First, if Bill Gates wanted to take over the world, he would have a good start, but so would other software providers. Photoshop, Poser, and many more will automatically connect to the Internet and check versions, updates and so on UNLESS YOU TURN THIS STUFF OFF. I have XP Pro SR2, and I turned all the Microshit firewalls, virus scan and error reporting off when I installed it. Download the free Zonearlarm firewall from Zone labs and it will tell you everytime a program tries to connect to the Internet. You just tell Zonelarm "no". I use the free AVG Grisoft virus scanner and find it far superior to the commercial ones. Also turn off all the "checking" in Windows Media player, etc. Download the free Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware which will also help keep your machine free of trojans and spyware. Microsoft acts like all users have the IQ of a kitchen chair. I also empty my Internet cache at least once a week to get rid of the bad cookies. Sometimes I miss the old Internet when it was all BBs and text.