Tom AZ

Personally, Windows System Restore has failed me a few too many times, whereas ERUNT has never failed.

It's probably OK, but it's a one way firewall only. It helps protect against inbound intrusions, but does nothing for outbound issues.

You may want to consider a firewall.

No -- still a problem for me.

I've already tried disabling AdBlock Plus, but that didn't help. Can you tell me where to find the Windows HOSTS file, so I can take a look at that?

That's very interesting. Did your problem also involve YahooMail? I hope I'm as fortunate with a resolution.

That's a good idea, Andavari. However, I did install the most current standard version of FF under Returnil. Unfortunately, it didn't help at all. This whole thing is so bizarre. As far as I can tell, the only pages that won't load are my Yahoo Mail pages. They yield nothing but a blank screen. So far, every other site loads and responds just fine. I"m sure there's an answer, but who knows what it is!

I'm using FF 2.0.0.20. Haven't really changed any settings, but I'll check these just in case.

Everything seemed fine a couple days ago, but I've started having a very strange problem with YahooMail -- but only in Firefox. When I try to login to either one of my YahooMail accounts, it appears that everything is loading properly, but then all I get is a blank screen and it indicates that it's done loading. Interestingly enough, my Gmail works fine in Firefox. By the way, both YahooMail accounts work fine with IE -- so it must be some kind of Firefox issue, but I can't figure it out. I've tried several things, but it still doesn't work. Any help or suggestions??

Actually, I even thought about SpinRite, but that's much more sophisticated -- and it's not really the same kind of tool (and of course, it's not free, either). SpinRite is not just a diagnostic tool, but rather, a highly successful (almost professional) HD surface repair tool. Actually, I own SpinRite, but it's overkill for just doing a quick diagnostic scan -- and as you might imagine, it's pretty slow -- and thorough!!!

I have HD Tune, Dennis, but thanks for the reminder. Also, I'm not sure if that HD Tune scan is a read or write scan. Maybe it doesn't really matter. It would be interesting to know what protocol chkdsk uses in checking for bad sectors??

Thanks for the suggestions. Is there any other way (or perhaps even a better way) to check for bad sectors besides chkdsk? Are there any other applications that will do this?

Just recently started having a problem CheckDisk -- specifically the component checking for bad sectors (I assume that's the old ScanDisk program). It seems to run fine through the end of Phase 2 (I don't know how many phases there are). Then, I get this error message: "Windows was unable to complete the disk check." Any thoughts or suggestions?? Wondering if there could be some "Services" dependencies that aren't active or properly set?

Does any defragger really check for bad sectors?

Same combo I'm using. Only difference may be that I'm using AntiVir Premium because of its added protection for my POP 3 e-mail client.

Just curious . . . you're not running MBAM resident with Avira are you?? Didn't really think that was necessary with Avira -- thought it covered most malware issues.

Anyone else been having any problems with CleanSoft's Update Notifier over the past few days?

I guess that makes sense. By the way, Antavari, have you had any experience with Karen's HASHER? (Check my earlier post in this thread.)

Does anyone know if CRC is as reliable in hash analysis as MD5 and/or SHA1 when it comes to reviewing duplicates?

Anyone know how Karen's Power Tool Hasher compares with HashMyFiles -- or are they about the same?

Also use Macrium Reflect here.

Sophos Anti-Rootkit1.5 released today. New in this version: * Support for disk and registry scanning on new platforms: Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 7, and Windows 64-bit platforms. * Sophos Anti-Rootkit uses virus data if Sophos Anti-Virus is installed, and will report threats more specifically than if data is not present. * Sophos Anti-Rootkit can now scan every file on the disk instead of just the hidden ones, which will potentially find more malware. This option requires Sophos Anti-Virus to be installed.

Thanks, Andavari, for the detailed explanation.

Andavari, how do you use this program to find duplicate files? What actually constitutes a duplicate and how will it show up? Exactly what has to match?

I believe SAS and MBAM will scan for them as well.