Hi,

A couple weeks ago my little brother stayed the weekend. He brought his 
computer along with him, because he's as much a digital junkie as I am. 
I thought I would install Phun for him, since he's really into mechanics 
and physics-based mayhem in general. But every time I tried to navigate 
through directories, Vista would pop up with a message telling me that 
his computer may be infected with spyware or a virus. I got to looking, 
and sure enough, there's like twenty icons in the system tray, and a 
bunch of unusual tasks running behind the curtain. Toolbar this, agent 
that. It was ridiculous. My little brother had no idea what half of that 
stuff was. So I headed to the control panel, to see what I could 
uninstall. It was like a battlefield, with the computer side losing. I 
did the best I could, deleting every potentially malignant piece of 
worthless software I could find.

My question is how does does this happen? And why does it happen to some 
people more than others? How can a person be downloading and installing 
software without even knowing it? All I can guess is that it must be 
like what I experienced a few weeks back, when I accidentally clicked 
"yes" to a pop-up dialog. (my one and only incident in over ten years of 
computing [yes, I'm proud])

Do any of you out there know people who always seem to have infested 
computers? Can you spot a pattern of (mis)use which may be valuable to 
help these people keep their computers healthy?

Sam

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