I visited my brother-in-law in Canada last month and his son mentioned that he couldn't install a game (StarCraft) because it wanted DirectX 9 which he couldn't seem to install. Thus began the discovery of more virii on a single machine that was still functioning (sort of) that I have ever seen. Among the symptoms were that Internet Explorer was gone. (They accessed the net using the built in browser from WinDVD I think) Hitting Ctrl-Alt_Delete did absolutely nothing. They had the icon in the task bar indicating an illegal copy of Windows. (They had bought the machine from a store with it already installed and had no disc.) It was still SP1. They were connected to ADSL and it was on most of the time. They also had NO anti-virus program or firewall running only somthing called SpamStopper. I installed AVG A/V and the following picture shows the scan results: Infected Canadian Machine Has anyone ever seen anything even remotely similar? "Two roads diverged ina wood, and I -- I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference." R. Frost

Are you bragging or complaining - you're saying the problem is solved? 'SpamStopper' cannot even remotely be considered as any sort of malware protection - you might consider trying an online scan at Panda or elsewhere, as well as installing Ad-aware & Spybot (for a start) - Ewido is also a good one that you can use indefinitely (although shareware) Check out the links at the top of the forum page ('security tools') We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true

jboy I was not bragging or complaining. I recommended that they buy a legit copy of XP and format and reinstall and get a good A/V and firewall. I haven't heard from them recently so don't know what has happened (I'm in Australia). I've just never seen so many virii on one machine and thought others might be interested hence the screen photo. I was stunned. "Two roads diverged ina wood, and I -- I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference." R. Frost

Hi, One morning my work computer advised me on boot that the Anti Virus program ( I will not name it ) was 19,710 days out of date. I wasn't born when the last update must have happened. More worringly it did this several times over the next few months. Date and time were correct. Ceri