Is this something to be concerned about?

[GoddessOfGuinness]

A new, unlabled window briefly flashed on the bottom of my IE screen. If it was my mailbox, it would have had a label. My pop-up blocker is on, and I'm not logged into anything that does pop-ups anyway.

Could this be an intruder that my Norton isn't telling me about?

[lenidog]

1. Could have been some kinda spyware.

Therefore your Norton wouldn't catch it. If you don't have a spyware remover check out Lavasofts Ad-Aware. Its free and works great and they keep on the ball with updates to keep ahead of the spyware developers. Another one you might want to get is Spywareblaster which is a shield that prevents spyware from getting uploaded to your computer. Again its free.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

8. I've gotten Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D

as well as Spywareblaster. I should probably do a scan since it's been about a week. Thanks! :hi:

[Karenina]

2. Goddess...

Dump IE. A 20 member viola section will play a unison moderately in tune
before IE gets its shit together.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

4. LOL!

I thought I'd heard all the viola jokes!

[billyskank]

6. What's the best noise a viola can make?

[GoddessOfGuinness]

9. You got me...

What's the answer?
There must be a new generation of jokes out there!

[NoSheep]

7. Using Firefox right now. I just love it! Get rid of IE. It's like hiding

in plain sight!

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Could be anything...

and if you're using XP, it could just be one of the zillions of little XP "helpers" out there.

Somewhere, you can configure the thing to run logs of everything it does and look through pages and pages of cryptic stuff to see if anything bad happened.

Dumping IE is a good idea, but whether you dump it or not, TURN OFF ACTVE-X. That can run even if IE isn't running, and it's the favorite way for script kiddies to get into your machine. Damn thing doesn't do much anyway, and I hate websites that use it for cuteness.

(Some people say Mozilla/Firefox is the answer, but Opera is the most secure browser out there at this point. Really.)

[GoddessOfGuinness]

5. I had turned off ActiveX, but

Norton is telling me that I need Active X to check for possible security threats. Are they big fat liars?

[TreasonousBastard]

10. Symantic, PCPitstop, and a few other places...

legitimately use Active-X to check some things on the system from their sites. It does have its uses.

It's OK to turn it on for the tests, but I would hesitate to leave it on when not needed.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

11. I'm finding that out!

They just eradicated a virus I didn't know I had. I wonder if it was recently acquired, or if it was something that coudn't be detected without the ActiveX?