Originally posted by always quiet
I mentioned the kazaa to him and he said he had been there once...some sort of music download service. 
Still scanning....over 65,000 files! How many are in the computer! 
How many files? in Windows XP, about a Million Six......
The best way to do the full system scan is to set it off just before lunch, or better yet before bed. XP does things a little different than older operating systems. It's easier on the user, which means more complex on the back-end (the garbage that takes place behind the scenes, like the kitchen you never see when eating in a fancy restaurant), which means more files, and bigger files. To put it in perspective, 1 gig hard drives, at the time thought a "marketing ploy" no one would ever use, came out less than four years ago (I think, and if I'm wrong, I'm an expectant father here!). Now, I don't recommend smaller than a 40 gig, and you're joking yourself with a 20. Regardless, these large hard drives with numerous system files can take forever to fully scan.
As for download services like Kazza....these are very, very popular with the younger set these days, basically to trade files (usually files they aren't supposed to be trading, but that's another topic, for another day, in another forum). You may have heard of "Napster," the mother of all file share sites. Kazza, I think, is similar. So immense is the amount of bandwidth (Internet highway) taken up by this process that many colleges are now slapping fees on tuition to cover the cost.
Viruses, generally speaking, are created by young twits who seem to enjoy the mere thought they've made an adult feel pain. When I was a kid, we'd throw eggs at people's houses. Same basic principle, no rhyme nor reason. Just the sheer, immature joy of disrupting, and killing your own boredom at the same time. And just as we'd not throw eggs at a house with the lights on, nor would we throw them during the day, those who would send viruses no longer try to send them via floppy disks (the original preferred virus travel method) because no one uses them. They send them via email attachment and put them in these file share sites.
Why? Because they can make them look like something you actually may want. If your DS wants a music file called bighittoon.wav, then a person wishing to spread a virus may make the file look like bighittoon.wav. There are ways to tell if it's not what it seems, but it's hard for the non-chiphead to do. Thus, DS downloads bighittoon.wav (which might actually look like bighittoon.wav.scr if looked at properly). Now, you have a virus residing on your system. It's not doing anything, it's just there. Once he attempts to play the song, it invokes the virus. Welcome to spybot.
Next time your McAffee runs, it says "whoa thar, what be this?" If it's set up properly (it sounds like it is), it will immediately take control of your computer (giving you the option to override it) and cure the problem to the best of its ability. Email is getting safer because programs like McAffee and Norton can pick these viruses up when they're inbound, thus before they're invoked. And they simply quarantine them. This became imperative when viruses were created that could procreate. They did this by not only launching themselves on your system, but they'd go to your email address book and launch them to your address book with random subject lines. Imagine a family member getting an email from you that has a virus attached and says in the subject line "look what I found." They figure it's ok, open it, and BAM. So virus software is now default set to roam your email before it shows it to you.
Beware the strain of virus known as "the redneck virus," a series of emails that have no attachments, and no viruses. One merely sends out a not to many people that says "I found a virus on my machine and probably sent it to you. Search your system and if you find a file called "win.ini," erase it and you'll be covered." No virus there, but folks will go "oh, no" and send that message to everyone. If you actually perform this task (erasing a file with an ini extension), you're erasing essential computer files. Thus, YOU are the virus. Neat, huh? At the end of the day, you have a virus when McAffee tells you, not when a friend emails you.
Probably more than you wanted to know, huh?
I'm running the virus scan right now and it found a "spybot.worm". When it finishes scanning, will it give me the option to disgard this file? How did I get one when I always have McAffee running?
Still scanning for more....it looks as if it found this one in my documents! 
