Somehow, I managed to pick up a virus. I downloaded Clamwin (Clam antivirus for Windows -- an open source virus checker) and it went nuts telling me that just about every .exe, .scr (screen saver,) and maybe a few other types were infected. Not being one to goof around, I popped the Win 2K disk in, rebooted, and did a fresh install on my C: drive. It wasn't just any fresh load, though. I deleted the partition, reinstalled it, and formatted it with NTFS. Once I got things loaded, I used the infection report file to delete all the bad files from the secondary partition of my 40 meg... I mean gig drive [snicker.] The trouble is, I have a bunch of old drivers and software on that drive. The fortunate part is that a lot of it was there only because I never deleted it after I unzipped it and moved it. For a while, I thought I had lost some difficult to replace items, like Smart Ripper (removes encryption from DVD video files,) a DVD codec installer, and a few other things. After all was said and done, I managed to free up a three or four gig on that drive -- all without losing anything of any consequence.

I still don't know where that &*(% bug came from. I thought I had brought it from my old place of employment and accidentally infected a copy of Gunman. I deleted my copy and unzipped the archive.

Infected. (I could tell because the executable has its own checksum inside and warns that it had been altered.)

I was sure that I had zipped infected copies of Gunman and Half Life oh so many years ago. So, after cleaning everything up and doing one last scan to make sure that everything is clean, I unzipped a copy.

It was clean.

Now I get it. My coy of Winzip was infected, so it immediately infected all the programs as it unzipped them.

Extract and infect in one easy step. How convenient!

So anyhow, I'm up and running better than before -- except for the fact that I have a bunch of MP3s and several years worth of email on my toasted 120 gig drive. I also have my backup copy of Visual Foxpro 7.0 on that drive. I ought to have it on a CD somewhere, but I haven't seen it in a while.

Still, all in all, I came out remarkably unscathed for having had to deal with such an aggressive infection.

As an extra safety precaution, I zipped both my programs\ and drivers\ directory with a password so that there's no way a virus is going to get to the files inside (though it could trash the archive.)

The next thing I need to do is to make another attempt at using System Rescue to fix the 120 gig disk (Thanks Jo-Anne!) I managed to make the bootable CD and use it, but I didn't get the disk fixed.

Someone needs to come up with a suitable punishment for people who write malware and let it loose on the web. Maybe Amy can morf them into pig hybrids or something.

OK... rant over. Even nerds need to vent sometimes.

Ray Drouillard