Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help me. I have a firewall called Sygate and every now and then a security warning comes up. In the security Log under "severity" it states 'Executable File" and the "Severity" states "Major" and the "Direction" is "Outgoing". The application name is "C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe. Is this a problem and if so how can I fix it. Thank you so much for reading this message, your help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards.

hi kira, your explorer.exe is right where it ought to be, that is in your C drive and in your windows directory. Now if your firewall gives you warnings that your explorer exe wants to connect out to the internet then you might have a problem, you may have a trojan that is broadcasting out from somewhere in your windows directory. do you have an anti-trojan software? if not go to www.thepublicworks.com, scroll down to payware and link to trojan hunter, do the following: download a free 30 day trial of trojan hunter then get the latest defs. also when in trojan hunter download these 2 free software programs, autostart explorer, and netstat. autostart explorer will show you whats loading and starting up in your win.ini, sys.ini, run services, etc. and netstat will show you if you have any trojans inside your computer. remember when using netstat that you have to look at the remote addresses column,(look and see if you have any remote address and port numbers) then the state column and see if anything says Established that corresponds to these remote addressess. if you see anything suspicious in those 2 columns, go to www.thepublicworks.com, security section, and link to tantalo ports, and do a search by inserting the port number. it should tell you info on the trojan. alright, when you have done these things, if you have found a trojan or any malware try this: disable your system restore to flush out any malware from your restore folder, get your latest anti-virus defs, spybot and adaware defs, you already have you anti-trojan defs. reboot your computer into safe mode, scan your machine with all these programs, delete all files that they come up with, clean your cache, temp files, history and cookie folders, and clean out your recycle bin. reboot your computer into normal mode, re enable your system restore. all the best, murve

I doubt its a trojan. It sounds more like you have used explorer.exe instead of internet explorer as a browser at some stage. You will find better trojan scanners at http://www.anti-trojan.org. Trojan hunter in my opinion is pretty ordinary as far as trojan scanners come

i block explorer.exe from connecting to the net everytime I run a search of the hard drive, I think it is normal for this to happen in xp. it started right after a clean install, on a new hard drive. if you block it ,it'll slow down right click openings to a crawl. that started after one of the critical updates.

Thanks Murve, Jon & www for all your help.