>Peter Moreton wrote...

>my 2-cents worth: I just this week started using the free version of Opera.
>I have to say that it makes IE look very old-fashioned indeed, and I now use
>Opera for all web browsing. I only intend to use IE occasionially, to keep
>'up to speed' with this product, as I'm an IT professional, and have to be
>competent with MS products. Opera is far, far better.

I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with Opera after
you've had some more time with it, esp. with regard to security;
I'm becoming very irked with this ad-ware problem and don't want
to repeat the experience.

To update on my original post, the problem is still there despite
repeated anti-virus scans and running Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D,
and I'm about to give up and just wipe the HD clean and
re-install WinXP from scratch- and then use Mozilla or Opera in
place of Internet Exploder.

A goodly part of the angst is coming from the fact that I'm
relying on one computer to do everything: e-mail, WWW, CAD, word
processing, photography, everything.  So having to re-install
WinXP means having to re-install every one of my applications, a
huge task.

I'm now thinking that it might be worthwhile to pick up a second
computer, a cheap, low-end machine, to serve for e-mail and WWW
only, and reserve my existing computer for non-internet
applications ONLY.  So if the internet box gets trashed by the
kind of mal-ware that's plaguing me now, doing a complete OS
re-install won't be such a big deal.

This sucks.

Dave D.

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