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Interesting. Things have become worse since this morning. I checked the links earlier today and they seemed to work (I don’t currently have Zonealarm installed so I couldn’t check to see whether it could auto-update). Right now, it seems to be totally off the air. Maybe they’ve been hacked?

I’ll second HansV’s answer. I went through a period when I was getting so many of those that I added a filter to automatically junk them. I keep my AV and firewall up to date and scan for spyware regularly so I never concerned myself with them.

Well well well… I was wondering! AVG did claim to have found Flooder.ake on my system, but only in my C:I386 directory and in one of the system restore directories. I was wondering whether that was a false positive of some sort, since I practice “safe hex” and haven’t had any reports of virus, worms, etc. for years. I just checked manually – my winlogon.exe in system32 is still intact (I’m sure windows would have got violently ill if that copy went away, but I thought I’d look manually). See the comments in the AVG forum.

(After posting the above I looked again and saw “Please note that this issue may happen on a very old Windows XP systems without any Service Packs. This issue doesn’t appear on Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2.”. I’m guessing that’s why it saw it in C:I386 and not C:WindowsSystem32 – I think the C:I386 folder is a holdover from when I first got my Dell way back when).

Works for me too (FF 2). I even tried the little buttons to scroll the map. Have you tried starting Firefox in Safe Mode to see if an extension is making it misbehave?

Do you happen to have the Tabbrowser Preferences extension installed? That looks reminiscent of the problems I had (java script: urls misbehaving) when I first switched to FF2.0 I fixed it by disabling the Tabbrowser Preferences extension.

See http://free.grisoft.com/doc/20/lng/us/tpl/v5%5B/url%5D

Support for version 7.1 is being discontinued on Jan 15. Version 7.5 is the newest version. See New Free Anti-Virus

That’s actually an Access question, not an XP or Windows question. If you don’t have Access installed, you won’t have system.mdw. On my Windows XP system with Access 2000, it’s in C:Program FilesCommon FilesSystem.

You’re not very clear, but I suspect what you mean is

me.lastupdated=null

PC. It took me quite a while to realize that my problems weren’t the fault of the actual sites I was accessing (since everything else worked fine).

There were only two cases I ran into, only one of which is publicly accessible (the other being the interface with my phone company’s web site that lets me retrieve my voice mail messages on my computer). http://tvlistings4.zap2it.com/partners/gri…?partner_id=097 shows TV listings and might require some configuration if you try it. If you do go there, get it to show you a TV schedule, and then try clicking links for specific programs. Almost invariably it would immediately (i.e. not even the usual very brief pause if you try to go to a nonexistant web site) complain that it couldn’t find that web site. Interestingly, every once in a while it would work. I never did figure out the pattern to what would make it work.

I realized that the problem didn’t relate to sudden issues with those web sites when I decided to try playing with safe mode in Firefox and realized that they loaded properly again. After establishing that the problems were quite repeatable I narrowed the problem down to tabbrowser preferences.

If it doesn’t cause you problems, fantastic. My only point given my experiences and those mentioned in mozallazine, is that if you run into odd situations with Firefox 2 regardless of whether they seem tab-related, try disabling tabbrowser preferences to see if it makes a difference.

I didn’t force my users to create a password if their password was null (I just warned them), but I did check for it. All you need to do in code is attempt to change the password from a null password to a null password (i.e. there is no net change, but you are still “going through the motions” of changing their password). If the code succeeds then they had (and still have) a null password and you need to prompt them for a new one. If the code fails then their password wasn’t (and still isn’t) null.

It’s rather fiddly these days for me to dig out my old code, but if that isn’t clear enough I’ll see if I can track it down for you.

Start up the Securty Center. On the left under “Resources” you’ll see “Change the way Security Center alerts me” (if you just see “Resources” with nothing under it, click the double arrow beside it). Click that, and uncheck what you don’t want it to warn you about.

Try putting a comma after acTable

I know “security by obscurity” is the worst kind of security to have (other than none at all), but nonetheless the mere fact that one is using something other than IE does add a small element of security in the sense that there are many more worms and trojans that depend on the victim using IE to work than there are that depend on the victim using Firefox to work. Similarly with Outlook Express vs. Thunderbird. Yes, there are a great many threats out there that do not depend on what browser or mailer you use, hence the need for firewalls, antivirus, and antispam software.

As well, de gustibus non est disputandum (can’t remember how to spell the french phrase, so I used the latin one ). There’s no arguing taste. Once I started using Firefox and Thunderbird I grew to like them better than IE and OE.

Finally, and a very minor point, when presented with two equal choices with no better way to choose between them, I’ll happily take the non-Microsoft route just to do my little bit to fight Microsoft’s attempts to take over everything remotely related to computers.

Forgive me if I am stating something that is painfully obvious to you, but can you not just back up your e-books to external media (floppy, CD, network drive, etc.), rebuild your system, and copy them back?