sbogorman

DennisD, Thanks for the detailed advice! At the moment I'm away from home and that machine, but I will try what you suggest tomorrow and post back. And of course in the meantime, if anyone has a spontaneous spark of insight, well, I always welcome insight! Thanks very much once again, sbogorman

Keno69, For my home pc, my wife's home pc, and my work pc, I have always downloaded CCLeaner from ccleaner.com. No problems with the other machines, and as I wrote above, I believe no problems with this particular machine until recently. sbogorman

DennisD, Thanks very much for the welcome and the advice. I have never knowingly installed anything like you describe, let alone even heard of Returnil. I've been using this pc for years (yeah, yeah, DUH, given my operating system) and I've never had a problem like this before with other free, reliable and mainstream security software. I cannot honestly say I am absolutely CERTAIN, but I only noticed this when I tried to update to 2.26. In other words, I believe I previously used versions in-between without this problem. THREE THINGS that might be important: 1. I recently switched from dial-up (Earthlink) to cable (Comcast) access. 2. I recently switched to Mozilla Firefox as a browser and, because it's my home machine and I use it mostly for basic stuff (local weather forecasts, personal e-mail, shopping) I do use My Yahoo as a homepage from which I surf. 3. The CCleaner directs me through the update installation process using Internet Explorer, which otherwise I do not use. Could any/all of the above be the problem? Thanks again, sbogorman

I have (correctly) installed and reinstalled v2.26 et cetera a half dozen times, but each time I restart my pc, I'm back to this particular old version (v2.11.626). FWIW, I'm running Windows XP sp3. Also FWIW, after I install v2.26 each time I run a scan and get rid of a bunch of gunk, so while I have it (that is, until I turn off my pc) it works great. It just won't "stick." Thanks much for any advice, sbogorman