You can't be paranoid enough. I installed some free innocent looking animated icons on my Windows laptop. A month later, when I installed and activated Norton Internet Security, I was notified the free software was trying to send information back to its web site. I assume it was marketing spyware but it could have been even worse. My question - How do you know your disconnected computer won't do something evil when it is reconnected to your network? I recently diagnosed a customer computer that wasn't shuting Windows down gracefully. I used MSCONFIG.EXE in the Windows directory and looked at all the programs being loaded. The cheap Juno Internet service had marketing spyware installed telling them what topics were of interest to the customer. Consequently, when the customer went to a automobile quote site, he started getting automobile popup adds and automobile sales email. Of course, such programs tie up ram memory and slow down the Windows startup. The following site provides a list of all programs detected as running covertly during Windows startup. It also explains their removal techniques. http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup\_content.htm#THE\_PROGRAMS

I recently did this in VC++. If that is your language, let me know and I will post an answer.