James had been having a problem with his computer for the past few weeks or so.

It started when he downloaded the newest "Elf Bowling" game from the Screen Savers site (SS is a one-hour weekday television series on TechTV that gives you all sorts of tips and tricks for your computer and videogames, provides computer hardware reviews, etc.). We have found the website informative and the little bits of software they recommend quite useful.

Elf Bowling, on the other had, is just for fun. The original game was simply a bowling game with elves for pins. You stood in for Santa, trying to bowl down the rude, taunting elves (apparently there are labor problems at the North Pole). Version 2 was even more irreverent, involving using Mrs. Santa's bra as a catapult to knock down elves in a version of shuffleboard.

The moment James downloaded this year's version, however, he ran into a problem: every time he either went into My Computer or Windows Explorer, he got a buffer overrun error. The nadir of the entire affair was last week, when he was trying to put in a Paypal order for some special decals. He prefers to use Mozilla to browse the Web and for some reason Paypal kept telling him he didn't have cookies enabled when he did.

When he tried to open Internet Explorer, he got another buffer overrun error.

He spent most of one night downloading Microsoft patches that claimed to fix the problem. Four downloads later, he was still at status quo.

Then he downloaded the newest version of AdAware, which is software that checks your computer for spyware. While most spyware simply tries to gather information on you, some of it forces your computer to do things it isn't supposed to do, or occasionally mucks up your unit.

The latter evidently is what caused all the trouble. James ran the progam, ran a scan, and deleted about 13 files AdAware told him contained spyware. Once those were deleted, My Computer, Windows Explorer, and Internet Explorer all worked fine again.

He warned me to do so, even though I'd been having no problems with my computer. Zowee! AdAware identified 31  files on my computer that were carrying spyware!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 2:24:00 PM

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