[wplug] Windows - Is this happening to you too?

[A. McCullough]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Harrold" <jmh17 at pitt.edu>

> I'm sure that is what he told you ;)

Before sitting there with a "wink, wink, you don't know EVERYTHING", do a web
search for "start.chm". You'll find quite a bit on it (including the description
of how to get rid of it). At one point the "mastersearch.com" website which
appears to have been the point of origin of this problem had an apologetic page
up which said, in essence, "oops. Sorry. This was an experiment gone awry" and
they proffered a removal tool which almost no one used because one person who
decompiled it said it also carried a form of spyware. That apology page is gone
now, BTW.

Again, the point I was trying to make is that even still, as of this writing,
none of the "protection" software I use has any form of definitions for this
problem. Windows is simply a wide-open system made even more so by Uncle Billy's
determination to make our home computers nothing more than nodes on the
Internet.

Yes, you can NOT use IE and turn off active-everything and all forms of
vbscripting and javascripting, but you'll severely hobble how many sites you can
visit that will WORK. Heck,  you can block all forms of mime-integrated objects
and then find out you can't download anything at all, including stuff you
WANTED.  It's amazing how much of the 'Net is now written to IE standards (all
glitz and no sense).

Anyway, I think we've worn out this point by now. We're all agreed that Windows
isn't exactly secure - some of us agree with that more than others but to a
point we all agree - so let's get off Windows and back to the focus of this
forum.

Cheers
Anna