Just yesterday I had a problem with ZA. After about an hour of being connected. vsmon.exe was taking up all my CPU time and was eating up memory (i finnaly stopped it at 96megs). I have Spybot and Norton Antivirus. I did a search in both(each was up to date on deffinitions). And they found nothing. I got the new version of ZA and the same problem came up (approx an hour of up time). So i uninstaled it. Got Sygate's firewall. And now this morning SMC.exe was taking up all the CPU's time ANDthe kicker here was it was Uploading something at 1Mb/s!!! So i physicly disconnected it and shut Sygate down. Now I have no firewall protection on. Theres gotta be a trojan or a worm at the heart of this problem but NAV wont find it. Anyone having the same problem? And does anyone know whats going on?

Well I'm not a great lover of Norton's - their AV and SystemWorks are resource hungry bloatware products. I recently fixed a PC running Norton 2003 AV (latest definitions) that missed the well known Nachi virus !! I suggest u go to: http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/ and perform an online virus check on ur system. You will need to disable any firewall for it to scan btw. Good luck

I had the same query as Goat_E, and was glad to find the referral to ActiveScan, above. I went to the Panda Software site and ran the free virus check. As part of the process, software was installed under C:\windows\system32\activescan. It may have been installed elsewhere on my system, as well; I don't know. When the virus check was finished, I found that the software installed on my system was still there. However, it was not listed on the Program list, so I could not use Add/Remove Programs to remove it. Since I did not know where all the program files might be, I could not simply delete the ActiveScan subdirectory. There are at least 7Mb being taken up by this program; and, while that may not seem like a lot, I think the user is entitled to choose whether or not a program stays on his system. I went to the Panda Software site, hoping to find out how to remove this program. In order to use Tech Support, you first have to register the program -- and you can't register a program unless you buy it, so that was a dead end. I also looked for a way to simply e-mail the company, but all I found at the ActiveScan site was an opportunity to tell them how to improve their product -- with instructions telling the user that they do not respond to these e-mails. So -- if you decide to use ActiveScan, be warned: once you download it, you can consider it a permanent resident. Perhaps this won't cause you any technical, functional problems; but it's presumptuous, high-handed and rude, and doesn't speak well of what the company thinks of its customers. And that makes trust difficult -- at least, it does for me. It seems as though most companies are insulating themselves from the end-user these days. Perhaps it's cost-effective, over the short-term. But it breeds a lot of ill feeling. Microsoft, being unavoidable, may be able to get away with it; but we shouldn't tolerate it from companies with competition.