Sorry for my near absence yesterday. My XP VM went completely bonkers when I tried to create a snapshot (can't figure how this happened). It wouldn't let me mount the virtual HD and I couldn't recover from any snapshot either. I was temporarily able to created a new VM using the old HD mount and recovered my favorites and such, but the new VM was just too unstable so I bit the bullet and completely re-installed XP Pro/SP2 and then all the updates afterwards; took hours literally. lol

Lost my windows customization program since I got it from Give-a-Way; maybe it will be offered again someday. lol

To top it all off, I couldn't install my Win7 updates normally either; it would reboot then abort the install recovering from the recovery point. Had to literally install one or two of the updates (and reboot after each) for the updates to install. Don't know why; weird. Needless to say, I had a bad day yesterday. Maybe today will be better. Appreciate you all tolerating my spiel. lol

This time I created a complete recovery backup so I can import the appliance should this happen again; apparently snapshots aren't good enough. Oh well.

Ouch, we had something like that happen at work. Except all of our computers are now so far beyond xp out of date that anything is pointless.

I use XP for sandbox purposes (double-sandboxed) Z. I wish there was a Sandboxie alternative for Linux, then I would probably use Ubuntu.

Linux doesn't need a sandbox to keep out intruders.
Unless you install it passwordless,which some distro's offer (to make it more like Windows?)
Gerard.

Famous last words Gerard. Hackers will always go for the easiest and most popular system and currently that's still M$, but Applies I-(anything)'s are seeing targed hits now since it's becoming the king of that domain. I wish there was a bullet proof secured OS, but the only one would be one that no one accesses and which also is not online. lol

Sandboxie sort of acts as a useable honeypot. Everthing stays in the sandbox and the external system doesn't see a thing. It's like I use your PC to do my work; my system stays prestine. That's the only solution I've come to near bullet proofing my system and it's served me well. What killed my VM itself was something I did (yes; I'm my own worse enemy. lol). A good fireall and Sandboxed OS, especially a double-sandboxed one keeps the predators at bay.

Time to move to Linux Lyle...

The common fallacy so little users of linux.
More than 65% of all websites run on Linux.
I bet GC does too.
One more time: Linux is based on Unix which already had passwords and privileges before DOS came on the market.
Gerard.

I know most of the servers are Apache Gerard; not sure how the Apache servers handle driveby attacks since many sites get compromised and pass their mal-payload to visitors.

Anyway, I remember I had to hack a few things to get my upload speed via NAT fixed and I spent the better half of the past day re-discovering the secrets (which this time I wrote down). The biggest thing which really dramatically fixed my upload speed might be of interest to a few folks here (the other is Vbox related so not sharing unless someone might be interested):

run regedit

navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

Add the following entry (dword; case sensitive) if it does not exist and set it to 65536 decimal:
SocketSendBufferLength=00010000 (again this is 65536 decimal)

Now reboot and you will be happy.