I have used the free PC Pitstop for years. It was a great program but a succession of "improvements" seem to have removed a lot of the advantages in my opinion. While buying computer parts I was offered the $39 program for free and took it, based on what I felt it did I would not be paying money for it. PC Matic seems to belong to PC Pistop. Never heard of Evensoft till your post. Cnet has offered this (amongst hordes of other sites of course) and in 14 months has had a mere 17,527 downloads with user rating 3 out of 5. Hardly a hit in my mind. It also cleans the registry which you should not be doing, registry cleaners are bad business unless the person knows what they are doing.

Absolutely owbist, back up everything and do an image if you can with Acronis. And follow all the download and install directions to the letter which means turning off all antivirus programs, firewalls, spyware protection and any other running programs, even better install it in safe mode where you have only minimal processes running. Using the cd or the full version is much better than doing it through update from everything I have seen and read on all the tech forums, you get the full install and it seems to go easier. So having the cd is a good thing plus you have it to keep should you ever need to format your pc and need it again. There just are no guarantees that things will go well, many thought they did have a good install and things are now showing up, why that is who knows, it could be specific to something they have on their pc that sp3 was not compatible with, think of how many programs there are out there, it is impossible to make any thing compatible with all. (however the big companies work with microsoft to make these things work prior to release that is why the beta testing for so long, so it doing what it is with programs like Norton and some of the other big names is not a good reflection) Unfortunately there were more people that had their restore points disappear than just that one instance and they had not changed anything so it is definitely affecting restore points on some computers. I have kept my pc fully updated since sp2 so there fore I have pretty much everything I need from sp3 already, at this point my decision is not to install with a wait and see point of view. What each person choses to do is up to them, it is however essential to know all the information so you can do so in an educated manner. That is why I am posting when something new has been discovered that they did not know, that way we stay educated as to what needs to be done and what to expect. But then you also have to expect the unexpected! LOL

You do not say how long ago you removed Spy Sweeper nor do you mentioned which firewall you are using. Anti spyware programs are almost as important as anti virus programs. If you do not feel inclined to use Spy Sweeper then there is AVG anti malware, Spybot Search & Destroy, Spywareblaster and AdAware. All are good, all are free. However if you select AdAware I would suggest AdAwareSE rather than the 2007 version. I use the first 3 on my computers. Are you using Zonealarm as your firewall? If so there is a possibility that might be causing your problems. It seems with a small number of computers, including mine, that Zonealarm causes problems. I removed it after a very long search and now use Comodo but there are other good free firewalls. You might consider a free online check up of your computer at PC Pitstop, linked below. Just watch where you click and go no where if money is requested. Then click each yellow or red flag showing on completion and read the comments. They will offer to fix issues for a fee but will also tell you how to fix it for free. Nice program in my mind. Here is a link that might be useful: PC Pitstop

I just bought an external drive this week and love it. Apart from being able to free up space on C:\, it is good for arranging automatic backups. I have it set to back up all of my documents, music, and pictures 4 days a week at a time when I am not going to be using the computer. Until now, I had been putting these backups on CDs and DVDs, but it is too easy to forget to make those backups, and it is also a nuisance saving and keeping track of the disks I saved them on. I like the way I can just drag things to the icon for the external drive, too. Easier than burning a CD or DVD, and it has the advantage that you can erase things and use that space again, the way you might on a floppy or a zip disk. My external drive is a 500GB Maxtor that I found on sale Mon. at Fry's in San Diego, for only $99.99. (They seem to change the products on sale from day-to-day, so I don't guarantee anyone will find the same thing at the same price another day. DH paid the same there the day before I did, but he only got a 300GB Maxtor external hard drive) Today a friend who has a business servicing other companies' computers told me he considers Western Digital's hard drives to be among the best, so you got a good one. However, I was happy when he also said I had gotten a bargain. Guess this is the time of year to look for bargains in computer stuff! I probably should mention that since my FireFox browser's "Bookmarks" (=Favorites in I.E.) and things I have saved in its "Scrapbook" add-on, or extension, are not located in My Documents and thus do not come under the automatic backing up, I am going to take care to back them up to the external drive manually every few days.