When I got home Monday I discovered two new icons on my desktop that I had never seen before. Instantly, I ran the virus checker (McCaffey's ) and Ad-Aware. Yuck. All kinds of programs I had never seen before, a couple of which could not be deleted until a reboot. So I rebooted and the checkers came up with 9 new files. Ran the process again, eliminating those files, rebooted, and blam, they were back again. There has to be a file that neither McCaffey's or Ad-Aware is getting that is initiating all kinds of processes when the computer starts. These spyware people apparently expect people to use checking programs and they have their programs hide themselves all over the place.

Strange, but the other time my system was also when I had just downloaded a new version of McCaffey's virus scan. I also had left my Yahoo IM on and I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

I've been afraid to use my home web browser because I suspect that the spyware will hijack it and download even more files. Now, when I get home today, I'm going to download:

SpySweeper
Spybot Search & Destroy
BPS Spyware Remover
HijackThis
Bazooka

and see whether they will get rid of these damned things.

For some reason spyware gives me a creepy feeling, like the sound of rats crawling in the spaces behind the walls. I'd like to ferret out the people who design these things and feed them poisoned cheese.