alexpgp | Winding down...

I'm one page short of finishing another section of translation, but I don't feel like finishing the job tonight. It's better to do it tomorrow... at least I know it won't take me long. :^)

Despite earlier declarations, I did sit down for about 10 minutes to see what I could see with regard to the infected file on zion. First, it turns out that I misread the data in the antivirus report: IE5 was not infected. Rather, it was a file called explorer.exe stored in a subdirectory whose path has 'IE5' in it as the extension to a directory.

I checked the path variable of the environment and did not see anything unusual.

The note from Kaspersky suggested I try deleting the file. That didn't work. It then suggested I search the Registry, which I did (to a broader extent than suggested by the e-mail). Next, I searched the autoexec.bat, win.ini, and system.ini files. No joy. Although 'explorer.exe. appears often in the Registry, to the best of my knowledge, none of the references were to the infected application sitting in its own subdirectory.

Nothing seemed to help solve the problem of why I couldn't just delete the file (the system wouldn't let me, claiming the file was "in use").

However, when I restarted the system in MS-DOS mode, I had no difficulty deleting the file. Nothing heinous has occurred since restarting the machine, but we'll let that simmer overnight to make sure.

Time to hit the hay.

Cheers...

P.S. Drew did call earlier in the day. They made it to California okay, but I suspect they arrived at oh-dark-thirty. But they got there safely... that's what counts!