Danger! Danger!

Whilst tootling about the interweb last night, I had something of a throwback experience - I got a series of warnings from my Norton virus scanner that I had picked up some sort of virus that couldn't be repaired.  As you might expect, I found this quite alarming.  About a year ago, I had a run-in with a nasty little worm that triggered my PC to reboot (usually when I was trying to download a fix).  This galvanised me into adding some proper protection onto my PC, and I soon had Norton Internet Security firmly installed.   Since then I have had pretty much a trouble-free existence on the web.  Certainly it is alarming the number of times that I get a little message saying that such-and-such a virus had been repelled, or this-and-that trojan had been thwarted, but I keep it all up to date, and basically they don't trouble me as I huddle beneath my firewall.

Until last night.

The message from Symantec was something like "These two files have installed themselves with your temporary internet files, and we couldn't repair them.  Sorry about that."  

Hm.   I immediately deleted all my temporary internet files and then did a bit of Googling to see what I could see.  From what I found, I **THINK** that I did everything that I needed to do, and a subsequent scan on my PC came up clean (although by now it was nearly 2am).  It's acted as something of a wake up call though.  Somewhat against my better judgement, I have left my PC at home this morning working its way through the installation of Win XP SP2.  We have actually been barred from installing this at work, as apparently it interferes with some of our applications, but after a bit of research, I am told that this is a sensible step to take at home to lock up a few more of those gaping holes in the Windows code.  Fingers crossed, eh?

It's dangerous out here.  Be careful kids.