SRS:

You may be right.

Just for completeness, here's a brief history (this material will not be on the exam). We bought this machine about 2 years ago and, prior to hooking it up we bought (yes, bought)Zone Alarm at an office supply store. Then we convinced ourselves that the XP firewall was as good as Zone Alarm (Justa Picker: where were you when we needed you?) so we returned Zone Alarm and got a refund.

About seven months ago we picked up some kind of spyware (that might not be the proper term) on our machine. It produced what looked like links on web sites but when clicked on them it actually called up a file that it had placed on our hard drive. For example, on our own site a new link appeared in which the word "escort" was blue. When we clicked on it we found sources for company for that evening but no one else who went to our site saw the "link". The source code showed no such link.

We located the three files containing the fake links but we could not delete them, rename them, move them to another folder, or delete the folder they were in. So we called in a consultant. He could not get rid of the files either but he installed Ad-Aware and Pest Patrol and one of these (we forget which) found the file which called up the errant links, along with 18 other spyware files, and he eliminated them.

He then installed the free version of Zone Alarm convincing us that it was, in fact, better than the XP firewall. Since we paid him eighty dollars, we had to believe him. For seven months all was well and then the current problem reared its ugly head but, fortunately, it seems to be departing from our machine to go haunt someone else's computer.

Bev and Jerry