vulgarcriminal

Erm, hello. I'm 26, female, live in the UK and am originally from Portland, OR. I work in IT, have a plant called Robert and am married. Stacked in the living room is a Gamecube, XBox and a PS2. My system is an Athlon 1.8 GhZ with 768 MB SDRam, 40 GB Western Digital. I have two other machines, an old Dell Optiplex P3 I inherited and an old Toshiba laptop I've also inherited. I can work with Red Hat, XP, 2000, 98, ME, 95 and SuSE. All I can think of really.

USB as well unfortunately, Firewire doesn't seem to have taken off enough to justify buying one of it's devices. It's also nice just to plug in my camera/mp3 player/scanner and have it detected by XP without screwing around.

Is this XP's firewall? You need to make sure that you're allowing the correct TCP and UDP ports for WinMX to get through. I think that information is available within Win MX. Check the support.Microsoft.com site for information about XP SP2, it probably has the relevant port information you're looking for. If it's Zone Alarm, it should just be as easy as telling it that service should allow inbound and outbound connections.

If you don't want to use other browsers, it sounds like you have a hijacker of some kind. See the post about CWShredder and the rest of it. Also double check that your DNS settings match those that your ISP wants you to have. It might be a resolution problem. (ipconfig /all from a command prompt in XP and 2000, winipconfig in 98/ME) If IE has been eaten by a Trojan, after you've cleaned it for malware, you'd probably also be best updating to IE 6 SP1, which is available from Microsoft. Best check for Malware anyway, even if you do switch to Firefox or Mozilla.

Adaware and SpyBot Search and Destroy usually compliment each other if run one after the other. Make sure that IE is closed when you do it. If you already have both, also be sure you've manually updated the definitions. Adaware doesn't go to its server automatically in the 'home' edition. If you're using XP, Windows 98 or Windows ME, use MSConfig to kill everything in your start menu. A lot of times spyware will come back if you've missed an executable somewhere. If you're using 2000, go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Run and kill anything in there. Be sure to delete everything in your IE plugins folder as well. You might also kill Flash or other useful plug ins but those are easily reinstalled.