Hello Caedes members. As some of you know, my faithful P3 finally gave up the ghost 2 months ago. 2 weeks ago, I bought an HP Compaq Presario with an AMD Sempron3000+...not a great pc, but a good place to start and easy to mod to what you really want. Problem is this: HP PRE-LOADS their pc with 3 spyware programs in which hackers and trojans notoriously use to keep ports open so that they may piggyback into your system. In setting up my new pc to my cable modem, my pc connected to the interne, and sure enough, I got 2 VERY UGLY worm/trojans. These don't show right away. What they do is take their time, and re-write your registry. By the time you figure out you have a problem, it is already too late. The ONLY way to remove them is through regedit. The best anti-spyware and AV programs cannot delete them. Now here's the rub. You can only delete them by going through run then regedit, but by modifying the registry, they protect themselves because the disable run, right click options, and task manager. Going into control panel freezes the system!!!I used external software to run regedit and deleted these nasties, but in doing so, they took their mutated registry friends with them. So buyer beware!!! If you are thinking about an HP or Compaq (same company) IMMEDIATLY uninstall : BackWeb, Wild Tangent, and Weather Bug. Now HP/Compaq will tell you this IS NOT spyware, but as I am a member of a well known hacking community, and have a great deal of knowledge in this area, I can tell you without doubt, that this ABSOLUTELY is spyware. Do not let your pc connect to the web if these programs are on it. The 2 viruses are called P2Pnetworks.exe and MSConfigs, not to be confused with the very important MSConfig. So now that I have got my warning out to you all, I will be offline for a while while I reformat, shred, then re-install (clean install) winXP, and get a bug free pc. Whether you have or are thinking about an HP/Compaq or not, beware of these programs I listed. They seem harmless, but they are not. Alone, they do no damage, but as I said, they are a way to piggy back through an open port, and THIS is how they are bad and let gremlins in.