Sorry for the off topic, but I dont know where to turn. Renderosity people are so helpful I am hoping someone can steer me in the right direction. I would be very grateful. I have Norton Virus running with a current update and full system scan. I run a current Zone Alarm firewall. I was simply viewing a file in a gallery, when with no warning, my monitor screen goes to black and the system boots. Never happened before. I go back on line and several minutes later Zone Alarm blocks an OUTBOUND attempt to access the internet from my computer at TCP flags:S. Now I know Ive got a problem. I do another full system scan and find nothing. Then I use an old dos trick to verify that a virus is present when it is at a level than a virus scan cant find. I run chkdsk from the command prompt on c drive. If the total memory is less than 655,360 then there is a problem. Well, my system will not allow a chkdsk. It returns a Abort, retry, fail? not on C drive but on a drive letter represented but a symbol that changes with each attempt. The rest of the system behave normally. Has anyone had this type of experience? Can you send me in the right direction to get this intruder out of my system. Thank you so much, Pinto

I run Zone Alarm Pro, and the number of attempted intrusions from Asia is staggering! I do not believe for one second these are all from ad banners, either! ASIA??? And it only happens here.

I think one of the virus tools (Systemworks by norton?) will run a scan off of the systemworks CD. If not, try booting your windows CD-ROM and reloading Windows. A re-load WITHOUT a format should (I wont guarentee it) preserve yoru settings and so on. The important thing is to run boot the system from something OTHER than that hard drive, to prevent the virus from loading. Then run a scan.

Thank you for the advice. Dell Techincial support indicated that it was so strange he couldn't even guess what it was and that the only cure was to format.Ouch! The Asian connection that hits me only here and EVERY time, is The International Trade & Exhibition Centre, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Somebody here really should look into what this is about. Pinto

Before you reformat try "The Cleaner" at www.moosoft.com it's about the best trojan detector I found. Some trojan's can not be picked up by doing a virus scan. Also try InnoculatePE at www.cai.com. I had Norton's also and InnoculatePE did the job where Norton's failed. I just go with InnoculatePE now and it's free. The Norton's cd is now a coaster. Beside's most virus load from the partition so a reformat might and might not help for that you need to redo the partition using fdisk. Good luck hope you can recover.

Sinixyl, Thanks for the advice, but I gave up and am in the process of formatting/reloading Windows. I'll try those programs you mentioned on the new install. At least on the newly formatted drive, the proper memory information showed up with chkdsk. I just wish I knew where I got this bug. There was no warning what-so-ever. Any way thanks for the help. Pinto