Sorcha - You have my sincerest sympathies

Install firewalls-keep your anit-virus current and active.

This was DOOZZZYYY!!!!

I am not a GEEK...but I am a fairly more than competant geek.

For three days... (close to 20 hours total) on a friend's machine I hacked a couple-hundred par-mutations.

His "beasty" conquered all my best skills today. I was defeated I/We turned it....back into the shop.... His virus (pop-up - HotBox) could write-back-onto-itself....alter the registry...it had German spawning verbage....

SafeMode, C:>, Reclaim, recover, scanreg, regedit, A: C: E:. recovery disks, 20 different autoexec.bat, sys.ini,

NIGHTMARE on ConFig Street!

PC - FOLKS - PLEASE backup the entire BOOT - Reg - Sys to a START-UP disk using, START, ADD, and Startup.

It could have saved me 70 dollars US...and 20 hours of interesting exploration.

Sincerely,

Gargoyle