I use Xtech - it is a resource that can do quite a bit of tinkering - have a look at http://www.xteq.com/ and get as many plug-ins as you sensibly can. But I think you are right about it being spyware. You could try cntrl alt del and look at what progs might be running but some can hide from that I am told and it may have hijacked the launching of IE. Try a copy of Netscape - particularly now it is not being updated. For spyware to run I would have thought you have to run an executable and there are a lot of them, eg extensions like com pif lnk scn (or is it scr for screen saver) as well as exe and a few I can't remember. then there are the macros in excel word and access (& Outlook) that look innocent, but not to Norton.