With Real Player, I turned off all the options I could, and it doesn't seem to make much difference...

If you run something like Zone Alarm (a useful free firewall) you can tell it to stop nusicances like Real Player trying to access the net everytime it feels like it - which seems to include trying play even a local file, cause it tries to 'help' you by downloading resource wasting pretty images to put in the player, etc.

Also Adobe Reader.

Some of these things put little 'robots' in the background processes, but you can't access them with 'Ctrl Alt Del' as they are hidden. You need to use something like HijackThis! to track them down. I just killed 'RealSchedule' again...

Unfortunately PCs are like cars - You need a certain amount of technical savvy to handle them. Most people have learnt to cope with cars, but the manufacturers of cars have improved the product since the early 1900's - if cars were like PCs you would only be able to drive them 10kms before they broke down on the side of the road, and you would need to replace the engine. I have several friends who have run their cars into the ground because they didn't check oil & water - one lady drove her car for hundreds of miles around town and just kept on turning up the radio to keep drowning out the increasingly loud grinding noise the engine started to make...

And with regard to 'driveby' hacking attempts - Zone Alarm (which is a stealth firewall) if set to display every external access attempt, pops up every minute or so on average - luckily I keep it in "don't display" mode or I'd never get anything done :-)

I've actually had cookies implanted on my PC when downloading emails - Mailwasher lets me 'peek and destroy'!

Robin