I found an interesting entry in my ZAP alert log. It showed a blocked attempt for MS Word attempting to connect to the internet to an IP address which is datapipe.com, owned by Tucows. It's a high speed web hosing company. Why on earth would MS Word be trying to connect to that site?? It also tried to connect to an IP address that whois said is an IANA address. This one has me puzzled. I looked in my startup and there is nothing new or unusual. Spybot only found the ususal cookies, nothing unusual. Second question: I look up IP addresses in the headers of spam that I get and sometimes it shows IANA. I know what IANA is, but why does it show that? Third question: is there a place where I can look up the processes of XP Home? Some of the running processes I know what they are but some I don't know. Thanks in advance :)

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm has some info on what the processes are. About MSword trying to connect to the internet.. I could say i dont know but i would be passing up a chance to say "get rid of xp it sux" :).

hee hee Word connecting to tucows :) maybe it wantes to update itself :) . umm that sounds weird my MD5 on Kerio never showed Word but it does have Frontpage and Visual Studio, don't know i think you shouldn't worry about Word .. and I Love XP don't see a problem other than Microsoft screwup and backdoors and that is on ALL windows. You live you learn ... you have XP why dump it lear how it operates its gr8 OS :) just needs the right patches here and there and a couple whacks to work right :) look for XP forums on net

Great link - thanx. XP Rocks ;)

Suzi, could you please give more details about this concern. What type packets, what port(s) are used, and what time it occured (i.e: startup,...) What versio of office and OS are you using?

The alerts occurred at 9:30 PM PST, the first one with destination IP 64.106.147.72:80, which means port 80 I guess. I don't know about packets - the ZAP log doesn't show anything. There were 12 attempts. The 2nd second was immediately follwing to IP 12.0.0.1:2467 Port 2467 with 2 attempts. Both were blocked by ZAP. The logs just says they were attempts of MS Word to connect to the internet to those 2 IP addresses. I am running XP Home with Office 2000. I did not have office or Word open at the time of the alerts. I was just surfing the web; according to my history I did not go to any page at the Tucows site and I did not visit that site datapipe.com which is where the first IP address goes to. Thanks Danny. I'm not upset about it but I am really curious about why this occurred.

Hi suzi. This is just a stab in the dark.... have you run a Trojan scan, or suspected a DDOS attack ? I picked up a bug that made Windows Explorer try to connect to the net... http://www.computing.net/security/wwwboard/forum/942.html I have Win ME but I believe XP also has UPNP.