Catch who is phoning home

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Is there a program that will tell me who is phoning home? I have run the latest AdAware with the latest signature file and have found no spyware, MSUpdate is banned from my machine and yet every few minutes or so someone is phoning home and I can’t figure out who/what is doing it. Even as I sit here composing this post – there is this sporatic activity on my dial-up connection (I refuse to use my ISP’s dialer – it was phoning home, so now I use the dialer that came with W98SE). Any and all help will be appreciated.

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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RealPlayer, McAfee and others are real famous for this. Look to see what is running in the “Task Manager” and list them here We may be able to help, with a list of what is running.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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There does seem to be a lot of stuff running, but I can’t figure out which one phoning home – here is the list in the same sequence as the showed up:
Netscape
CD Player
Explorer
Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar
Printkey2000
Gwhotkey
Hpodev07
Zapro
Rnapp
Visualzone
Hposts07
Hpofxm07
Hpoevm07
Webshotstray
Deskcolor
Monwow
Csinsm32
Em_exec
Navapw32
Hpoopm07
Mdm
Poproxy
Directcd
Pwstray
Starter
Systray
Wmexec
Csinject
Ocrawr32
Ocraware

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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Netscape needs a connection, this will do it every time
CD Player may be checking for a update or all of those new songs you want
Explorer
Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar
Printkey2000 could be checking for a up date
Gwhotkey
Hpodev07
Zapro ZoneAlarm Pro ?
Rnapp
Visualzone ?
Hposts07
Hpofxm07
Hpoevm07
Webshotstray could be checking for up date
Deskcolor ?
Monwow ?
Csinsm32 ?
Em_exec ?
Navapw32 Nortons anti virus, settings could be set to check for update
Hpoopm07 ?
Mdm ?
Poproxy ?
Directcd
Pwstray
Starter ?
Systray Sysem tray
Wmexec ?
Csinject “Nortons clean sweep”
Ocrawr32 OCR software, may be looking for updates
Ocraware OCR software, see above

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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FWIW:

Gwhotkey – Driver used to activate multi-media keys on Gateway keyboards
Em_exec – Driver for Logitech mouse scroll-wheel
Hp* – HP drivers: printer, scanner, fax, etc…
Mdm – Microsoft Debug Machine (not sure what it’s for, but pops up a message when you hit a website with bad javascript or vbscript)
Pwstray – MS Personal Web Server tray icon

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I found a site that has a fairly comprehensive listing of startup programs: Program ‘friendly’ name, executable name, and other notes identifying what program is loading, suspected/known spyware or viruses, whether the program is necessary or not, etc.

Start-up Applications: http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_full.htm%5B/url%5D

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See this post and this post on ZoneAlarm and Zone Log Analyser.

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If you install Zone Alarm (even the free version) you will have to give permission for each program on your PC that tries to access the internet. Since this is done one program at a time, you can easily tell what’s what.

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