There's good news and there's bad news. The good news first: the computer should be salvageable, and I haven't lost any data (yet). The bad news: the system that's gone down with a rotten, lousy, insidious virus that's been lurking in the background is the quad core which handles the big, powerful programs ... like DAZ, Bryce, Serif and so on.
It's a virus, nothing else it can be to produce this weirdness. AVG missed it utterly, so we uninstalled that and bought Avast. Here's the problem: Avast won't install. The virus again??? So I tried to reinstall AVG ... and it won't reinstall. Now I have no virus protection whatsoever on the quad core, so it's quarantined from that swamp of infection and infestation otherwise known as the WWW.
Next, we did a lot of work on my laptop to bring it up to date, and I was going to switch over to that for emails etc. And now, darned if I can get it to go online. So I'm on borrowing Dave's computer (we're starting to run low on available systems here: only two left after this one, and one of them is unavailable, and the other is ooooold and slow).
It's been a wonderful day (sound of sarcasm there), with about 6-7 hours blown off trying to install things that didn't want to be installed, and get computers online when they have no intention of complying. I guess I'll surrender for today and try again tomorrow.
Sigh.
Jade, 28 March
***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.
