Thanks for responding.

Yes, I did get 'wormed'....and believe it or not, based on the time of some of my files on my laptop, it occured while I had an aborted install of Norton 2004.

I was able to scrub Sasser, but after that, uninstalling and then reinstalling Norton 2004 from scratch led to 2 days of bizarre windows memory error messages. If I uninstalled 2004 and stayed 'disconnected', I was fine. But the minute I installed just the basic NAV 2004, my machine went haywire. There is just some type of conflict, even if I use MSCONFIG and reboot with minimal stuff loaded, but I wasn't able to pin it down.

I've used Norton for years with very few problems, so I'm chalking it up to a combination of my laptop, my version of XP Pro, and maybe just the combination of all my drivers. In the last 24 hours, I successfully cleaned Norton off and installed McAfee, and everything appears back to normal.

Technical guy that I am (or try to be!), I don't like attributing it to generalities, I'd love to know specifically why it was happening, but everything appears fine now with McAfee virus protection and firewall, so I'm not going to pursue it any further

(BTW, gotta love that McAfee pop up maps that point a line between Allentown and San Antonio, showing the possible IP address of someone trying to hit port 445 on my laptop).

Thanks,
Kevin