My main system acts as if it is innoculated. Also there was one other odd event that occured right at the time I cleaned up the host system.

Going back to when this all started.

1) Cleaned up host#1 after 1st noticing excessive & questionable pop-ups
(used Spybot & AdAware)
2) This host#1 is used for Internet browsing & is isolated from several other
servers where serious work gets done. I have an initial image of host#1
as supplied by the vendor. This is a WinXP Home edition machine.
3) The day of the above clean-up I added a login password (hadn't bothered
before as I can always rebuild the machine & consequently qasn't all that
bothered.
The day I added the login password, the system seemed to hang while booting.
After several restarts & checking the Ram & disk connections, I let the
machine take its time & it eventually booted (now boots like this each time).

I was sure I saw some Internet activity during the dead screen period - on
first start up I immediately had tried to disable the network connection but
found an extra network adaptor icon (configured with an ip address) & seemed
unable to turn it off (ignored the disable command).

I shut the system down again & removed its UTP cable. Upon restart (slow)
the network connection adapter icons were normal. (The icon resembled the
type of network adapter that VMWare adds when it gets installed).

I am now about to wipe this host#1 machine clean & do factory re-install.
I will also re-install Connectix VPC and a pristine copie of XP in one
VPC (have the WinXP CD that came from mfg. It installs ok as a VPC.

If anyone has any clues as to why the machine might have behaved the above way
I am all ears. Because the situation is abnormal as regards the events, I don't
know what interpretation to place on them. Am not overly worried as I can and
will reset to square one & I was deliberately pushing things as regards spyware.

Doug M

#2

AS OF TODAY - the host#1 computer is back to fast booting again. I haven't yet done the complete reinstall so I have no explanation as to why this has happened. The only other thing I have noticed is that while the slow boot was occuring, SpyBot would always list an error during checking. That seems to have gone now. ?.