Hi alostsoul,
Sorry to hear that, maybe you get lucky and the solution of Bill S. save you.
Alostsoul, you can show to your kids the following, you should be going
ballistic for the risk.
What is Adware?
Adware is software designed to track your usage patterns and display
targeted ads while you are using a free software package or while browsing
the web with a helper application you installed. The ads may appear inside
the application or may pop-up in separate windows. Either way, these ads are
based on information that has been gathered from your usage patterns and sent
to a server for storage and analysis. Typical applications include a program
like Kazaa that many users download and install without really reading the
license agreement (EULA) -- see, for example, Kazaa's Ad Support statement.
Watch what you download!
Many freeware programs, and P2P programs like Grokster, Imesh, LimeWire,
Bearshare, Grokster, KaZaA, and WinMX, Emule, eDonkey, etc. and others are
amongst the most notorious, come with an enormous amount of bundled spyware
that will eat system resources, slow down your system, clash with other
installed software, or just plain crash your browser or even Windows itself.
If you insist on using a P2P program, please read This Article written by
Mike Healan of Spywareinfo.com fame.
http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/p2p/
It is an updated and comprehensive article that gives in-depth detail about
which P2P programs are "safe" to use.
File-Swapping - Another common security breach is the practice of P2P file
swapping. Basically, people could connect to a special network and swap
files with each other.
Music files in the popular mp3 format are the most commonly traded, but any
file can be swapped, such as movies and pirated commercial software.
You should know that if you are file-swapping, your computer's security is
breached. File-swapping programs create a "Shared Folder" on your hard drive
where you put the files you wish to make available to others. If you enable
file sharing of one folder, your entire hard drive is open to the world. If
you use your computer for business or have important personal information on
it, those files are potentially compromised, along with all your passwords.
Additionally, you take the chance of downloading some sort of malware with
your mp3's. Trojan horses and viruses have already been found in the KaZaA
and LimeWire programs. If you decide to participate in file-swapping, be
aware of the risks. You are basically bringing a file into your computer and
you have no idea whether the computer it came from is clean (virus-free),
whether the file-swapper you got it from is malicious or not. The best thing,
aside from refraining from file-swapping, is to use a separate dedicated
computer containing no important data. A separate hard drive is not a good
solution, because it is vulnerable to infection from the main drive. There
are now many legitimate places to download music, such as iTunes, Real's
Rhapsody, and even Napster which has reinvented itself as a legal download
service.
Good luck