spyware

Last week my computer at work picked up a serious case of spyware. I've been digging a lot of twee-pop lately, and as you know, whenever possible, I post pictures of the bands and/or singers I'm listening to. As such, I'm fairly certain that one of the European websites I visited to obtain pictures of these bands uploaded some free programs for me. An early Father's Day present, perhaps?

Things were looking pretty bleak. Message Boxes would spring up from time to time bringing such glad tidings as "Your computer has been infected with spyware" and "Your virus protection has been disabled." At one point my desktop background was replaced with this message:

Security Warning
A fatal error in IE occurred at 0028:C0011E36 in VXD VMM(01) +
00010E36. Error was caused by Trojan-Spy.HTML.Smitfraud.c
* System cannot function in normal mode. Please check your security settings.
*Scan your PC with any available antivirus / spyware remover program to fix the problem.

My homepage was different every time I accessed the Internet. There were sites in my favorites that I definitely did not put there (and definitely did not visit in the first place). The Performance tab of the Task Manager said my computer was running at 100%, which explained why everything was so sluggish.

Yesterday afternoon, my life changed... I have a new work computer! Among other things, this meant making the jump from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. Yeah, I know, welcome to the 21st century. I'll admit it's really nice being able to do all those things I wished I could do with my previous OS.

For example... crossfading tracks in Media Player? Too good to be true... and it actually was. I think this only works for your music library, not CDs. Bummer. But I can finally listen to CDs without the reader getting confused and skipping and/or freezing. It was getting so bad that I actually considered (albeit briefly) going the route of the MP3 player. But that's no longer necessary. Maybe I'll test out the crossfading tonight at home since we're running XP there as well.