A friend complained her XP machine was 'acting up' and brave old me said 'no sweat...I'm a consumate genius and modestly can fix it in a jiffy'.

She brung it over me joint and I rolled up the proverbials and got stuck into it.

Bit of a mess was putting it mildly....it hadn't a firewall or AV running for 'some time'.

I found a dozen or two 'issues' with it ...before pulling out the drive and chucking it in a caddy to load into my own machine...to do a thorough clean....

Norton got about 39 .... Pest patrol a further 26 then Ad Aware got the last...another 20 or so.....about 75 in all, ranging from key-loggers, 4 virii, trojan loaders and trackers...usual crap.

Then it was a simple case of copying all the 'data' to backup, full format, repartition and dump the data back on the 'D'.

All well and good.

Put the drive back into her machine...installed her XP and loaded a freeware ver of AVG.

Of course, that was out of date....needed new signature files, so I got on dial-up to update them....went to make a coffee.

Came back half an hour later....

ERROR on download.......

Something was wrong...so I did a drive scan with the 'old' AVG, and Ad Aware.....

303 hits

Oops, thinks I....perhaps it'd be wise to load that Zone Alarm first, before hooking to the net.

ZA pops up....."Ist.exe" wants access...."bugger off", I say.

A rush of frantic denials and several sweeps of the system later and I'm back to squeaky clean again.

Still....she's happy, now....

Moral of the story....get yer protection BEFORE hooking to the pox-ridden net...