First a word of warning. This may not affect many of our members but may have already bitten one. Many computer manufactures are putting hidden partitions on the boot hard drive. This partition contains restore or repair data so their customer service can quickly restore the computer to the condition in which it shipped (regardless of the problems it may cause the customer). It seems that Partition Magic (or the person using it) sometimes has trouble with this partition resulting in lost data. The exact cause doesn't seem to be known yet, but with a popular and trusted program like PM, it will no doubt be resolved soon.

Now a little story about a trip out along the Internet trail. This story is particularly appropriate considering my previous articles about protecting yourself against Internet evils.

I was searching the Internet, via Google, for free or low cost shareware programs that would allow me to create bootable CD-ROMs without being forced to purchase an expensive program like Nero Burning ROM or Roxio's CD Creator (about $100 for either). Using these programs for that single purpose seemed to me to be overkill. Besides everywhere I checked it was claimed that using these programs was the only practical method and I did not like that. There is always another way. The point of this is that I was surfing the net in unfamiliar territory. After visiting several sites, Norton Anti-Virus popped up a notification panel telling me it had removed a virus from memory. I clicked OK and it then popped up another saying the same thing but referencing another virus. I was a little annoyed since you are not supposed to get virus infections this way, but, after all, that's why I use a virus protection program. I continued surfing and eventually found and downloaded several programs that seemed suitable.

When I closed Internet Explorer, I noticed a strange Icon (A Lycos Name) on my desktop. It's not too unusual for a site to put Connection Icons on the desktop to entice you visit some web page of special interest (to them). Normally I just delete them, but In this case I right clicked and selected properties, the target file was on my hard drive in a sub folder of the Program Files folder. A Program had been installed without my permission or any notification. My first thought was to uninstall it So I went to control panel and opened the Add/Remove programs applet.

The program was listed and, lo and behold, so were three other strangers. One was an I.E. Toolbar obviously associated with the Lycos program. The other two were called ClipGenie and BuddyDownload. I selected Lycos and remove. After a song and dance about whether I really wanted to do that, It indicated I had to connect to the Internet to uninstall. When I got there, I had to download a program and run it. I did so and it told me the program had been uninstalled. It lied! The program was still in the add/remove programs list. I selected uninstall again and this time it did the job. I went through the same procedure to uninstall the toolbar. ClipGenie and BuddyDownload uninstalled normally.

Everything is OK now, right? Not so! I ran Adaware (after updating its database). It found 84 malware objects, its term for anything associated with the bad guys. After having it delete those, I ran SpyBot Search and Destroy, I told you before I tend to be a little paranoid. It found three more bad entries but they were just directories left from the uninstall procedures.

Now there are two lessons here. First, I should have run Adaware first and let it do all the work, and second, I need to check my Internet Explorer security settings. They are all set to the install defaults (I bet yours are, too) and these are obviously not adequate for traveling in wild country. I probably won't change them since they are convenient and I don't travel the low road often. But, as they used to say, you can bet your sweet bippy that Adaware and SpyBot are going to be run immediately after every such trip in addition to the weekly exercise they normally get.

By the way, if you are interested, I can now create bootable CD ROM's, edit images copied from existing CDs, or create images of my own and burn them to CD. If I decide to keep this capability, which after all isn't used that often, it will cost me $30.

CAG