Gillian when I was using the Comodo firewall I seem to remember that the computer showed there was none installed. It caused me concern at the time too. However I think if you check the Add/Remove programs feature you will see it listed there. Click Start, click Control panel, click Add/Remove programs. There will be a time delay while the computer is listing all your programs.

owbist, Thanks, it was just me being stupid, not reading what was before my eyes. Yes, Microsoft's Windows Security Manager did show a firewall was on, and it was/is Zonealarm. I didn't expect MS to be so open as to say some FW other than theirs was active. I'm at a meeting and grumbled to my neighbor at the table, he looked over and said: "it says Zone Alarm is on".

As I suggested in your 'firewall problem' thread, you really need to do a couple of full scans (not a quick scan) to get rid of what is causing this problem. Your computer really seems to be infected.

Maybe the first thing I would do .. Go into the device manager(right click myComputer & select properties) and look for yellow exclamation or red stop errors. While there under Network Adapters you should see two adapters; One will be your wireless adapter and it probably says 802.11b/g/n and manufacturer name. The other network adapter should say something about 'Ethernet adapter and manufacturer name. Double click the Ethernet adapter and then look around for probably a check box that says something about Disable this device. I would disable that ethernet adapter because you aren't using it... that will stop that Network Cable Unplugged message,,, and might possibly be the conflict - if so you might get lucky and your wifi will connect after a reboot. Ummm, what else might you try. The Event logs in your computer management window might give you a hint what's wrong... thats accessable by right clicking myComputer and select Manage. You say you never have added hardware... hardware that would use an irq would be things like a portable hard drive, a flash memory card, anything usb, a pc-card slot device, a seperate monitor. Try unplugging things attached one by one to see if one of those might be causing the conflict. Hopefully its not your wifi card, but if after trying to eliminate the conflict and nothing else hardware wise stops the error message maybe you could disable the wifi adapter in Device Manager and then if the error message instantly goes away that would be a good indication its bumm or maybe rolling back or reinstalling the driver might fix it.