>>This is worse than I thought. All four PCs are hosed. This from the Mac, the only computer that will connect to the internet. The PCs are all reporting viruses. Worse, my backup drive got dusted. All my work, all my finances, everything gone. You may not see me for a while.
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>>Ouch, I'm really sorry.
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>>If you don't mind me asking, was this all due to viruses, or were there other issues?
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>>If they were at all due to viruses, what AV package were you using? (I hear random reports of things slipping through certain commercial products, so I'm always curious)
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>>Good luck,
>>Kevin
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>I'm not 10% sure what happened but think it was a virus. At one point a dialog box popped up at startup saying "SQL online", or possibly some other 6 letter word after SQL. There was a virus like that with SQL 2000 a few years ago but I had SQL Server 2005 installed. The other theory is that an unknown virus got in on one of the computers my daughters used and hosed the whole network. I had the McAfee subscription lapse on those machines since there was little valuable data on them (they mostly are on the internet). Dummy here didn't consider the possibility of something getting in and then spreading the network. Short answer, I guess I still don't know for sure what happened. Today's task is to get everything back up and running, and SECURE. And recovery disks created. Also to check out the data recovery service Al mentioned.
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>I was using McAfee on this machine. (Back on the main PC now. It is interesting that the Mac was spared. Maybe it's true that Mac OS X is inherently more robust).

Mike,
You might consider locking down the machines that your daughters use.

Naw, the Mac wasn't infected because viruses aren't usually cross-platform. If Macs were as prevalent as Windows machines, you would be hearing the same thing about them.