Lots of spy ware from GW.

>>>> "Well I will offer my weak ideas. I never worry about what a virus or Trojan is..." Me neither..... But then I run only Debian or a Slackware based Linux distributions on PCs here since early 2003....I do run an outgoing firewall though, though not much more than that "security"-wise, and I never ever run as "root". I have been online full time 24/7 for as long as 8 months non-stop running as many as 19 programs and 4 or 5 browsers with 20-something windows & 123 tabs open simultaneously----and other than the very occasional browser hang-up....never an issue, and not a reboot or a defrag or a registry anything, ever..... The link may be of some interest to you, or not. It is one of the preferred by noobies distributions, and it offers more to learn/do than any of the MSFT high dollar-ties you into MSFT formats forever-operating system. Though I have given out a few copies of VectorLinux ( http://www.vectorlinux.com/ ) or my personal fave SimplyMepis ( http://www.mepis.org/ ) or my other personal fave...Knoppix!!! ( http://www.knoppix.com/ )... Knoppix, never ever leave home w/o it...I take a Knoppix CD everywhere with me, there's one in the glove-box right now even...... But what the heck, eh? The most modern, safe, and secure, and very definately superior and it's, lemme see, oh yeah....free A much better deal much more secure than any MSFT OS and software that you can buy, which BTW you can not under any circumstances even put an MSFT OS you BOUGHT & PAID FOR on any except the >>>one PC What the heck... it's free, it's easy.... and it's damn sure secure......If it's good enough for the National Security Agency to base its own systems and software on, you reckon maybe it's good enough for you too? Oh yeah.... and the SecurityEnhancedLinux packages are so secure that the NSA has released, and released for free too, all the SEL code and software into the public domain, and released it all free of charge too...something that all yer friends in Redmond were hoping would have never happened.... Hope you found this somewhat useful..... Oh yeah, and if you like a particular distribution, you can even make 1,000,000 copies and give them all away, should that be your desire. More and more distro's are even including software so that you can "customize" a distro to your liking and then make a million copies of your newly modified OS, and give away the resulting OS/software package, with your name on it even if that's what you want to do with it........You should give Redmond a call and ask about doing that with an MSFT issued OS... And now, it's off to the woods with Sasha and Duke....the big dogs!!! HAGD!!! Here is a link that might be useful: A more secure solution...

I guess this is why it's good not to put all one's eggs in one basket, but use different scans of each type when reasonable (i.e. using online AV scans in addition to using one's preferred full-time AV program). Re: the PC Mag article(s): FWIW, Rubenking praised MBAM -- and I use it myself ! -- but it didn't find the four trojans that the ESET scan did. And my own free Avira AV scan didn't find them either. I'm not sure where trojans fall category-wise: malware or viruses. Or something else. But whatever programs should find them (av or anti-malware), mine didn't. :-( Perhaps I should have also tried AVG just to see if its results would have been better, but I was naturally more concerned with getting rid of whatever was in my computer than with doing AV, anti-malware tests. ;-) So my (albeit limited) experience of having ESET find and remove 4 trojans that MBAM and Avira missed, at least makes me lean in the direction of trusting ESET for future supplementary AV scan purposes. And, of course, I'll try the Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool again if necessary. (Since I ran it after the ESET scan, I have no idea if it would have found and removed the 4 trojans as well. And I hope I never have cause to find out in the future !!)

Sue, I just checked on your referral. I am going to try to remember to check how many new "fingerprints" are added just to see how much has changed. From v.02 to v.04 there has been an addition of 120 fingerprints. DA