W2K? No, I only installed W2K, then immediately W2K-SP2 (which, as I said, is the end of the line for Windows, as far as I am concerned.)
What is SP1a?
Now, as far as the beastie is concerned, what you're talking about, if I read you correctly, is a Trojan. AVG is supposed to identify trojans of this sort. If I am being pinged by someone trying to activate it, I would expect that 1) the firewall would bitch about the incoming ping, and 2) that the trojan infected file would be rooted out by AVG or somebody like that (McAfee might just miss it if it were relatively new).
There is a third possibility, of course. That being that Real replaced a Windows DLL with one of its own, and the uninstaller for it "conveniently" declined to replace it when I uninstalled it. Of course, Micros~1 swears up and down that that can't happen in Win2K, but I don't believe it for a minute. So, does anybody have details about Real...I seem to recal some kind of brouhaha over Real's "phoning home" some time back....
thanx-