so how is a hardware firewall or doing anything with port forwarding going to help?
And go back to win9x?!? Riiiight...no chance for corruption there, nosiree!
Now, Linux...there's a solution. Once I get a distribution together (find a decent admin primer), I'm there. Might not be a bad idea to do all my internet prowling from within Linux....
But in the interim, a Three R's looks like it is in my future.
Note that all this started happening when I installed Real's spyware. I now have the "enterprise"/gold version that someone (possibly you) pointed me to, and I will install it once I get rid of this "problem".