Malcolm, you must have had some grumpy flakes in your cereal this morning! The Mudcat is an excellent site to get some pretty-darned-good answers or guesses at solving computer and other tech problems, and the answers are usually prompt.

I understood the question to mean that the computer was working much harder than normal, and interpreted that to mean that something had directed it to start this work. Perhaps it is a participant in a denial-of-service attack to so overload a single site that it can't do it's normal work. Or maybe it's busy sending out a worm.

The free firewall should as a stopgap stop that, and then the program running it needs to be cleaned out. The free programs will help with this, and a regular routine maintained to keep it running. I second the various advice from Villan, Rapaire, Shanghaiceltic, and John in Kansas. I didn't have good luck with the free firewall, it wasn't tuned in such a way that I could send email without having to turn off the firewall, partially defeating the purpose of having a firewall. I went with several Norton programs (Anti-Virus, Firewall, and Ghost). I also use Ad-Aware (the free one) to weed out junk that still finds its way in.

A router between the modem and the computer provides a layer of protection; I've had far fewer alerts from my firewall software since I put in the router to serve a second computer.

The best thing to do for your computer is to regularly (daily) check for updates, both with the anti-virus folks and with Microsoft (you can sign up for automatic Microsoft updates). At work they have our network set up to run those updates automatically daily; I don't have the same resources so I do it manually. With three computers in the house it can sometimes keep me busy for a little while, but this is much easier than all of the hoops you have to jump through to fix it if the system crashes because you some of this crud going around.

SRS