I am not sure what it was or precisely how I got it. I thought I had taken all the right precautions.

My antivirus was installed and running. Spybot was installed and resident. The firewall was up. I never even touch Internet Exploiter. Everything was all patched up. I don’t run even a single mail client on that box. It’s basically just a gaming rig. And yet, clearly the thing was compromised. Suspicious network activity, blank entries in the Startup tab of msconfig that would reappear after being disabled, and shutdowns were always hung up by a mystery app named “Hidden Window” that I couldn’t find a running process for. There was a zombie in my den I could not exorcize.

So I dropped the Big One on it last night. I suppose it was time anyway, considering the OS had been on there since 2003, and that was actually an upgrade installation of Windows 2000 that itself dated back to that crazy summer of 2001 when the wind was in my hair and Windows Me was a fading dot in the rear view mirror. It also gave me the opportunity to repartition the drive- for reasons I cannot now fathom, I’d set aside a logical partition of 60GB and never put a single file on the thing. I’ve no idea why I did that, or what benefit I might have imagined it would provide.

And lo! My system is reborn, cleansed of taint and cruft. Or the cruft has been cleaned out of its taint. Whichever. It’s clean, patched, and ready for action, hopefully not to suffer another such episode until the DX10 cards start entering the market in force, when it’ll be superceded by the next rig and relegated to backup server duty. I don’t know why, but for some reason this nuke n’ pave has rekindled my long-dormant desire to geek out over new hardware.