This is a very quick post to explain why I'm not posting:-) On New Year's Eve I found I'd picked up the Peacomm trojan, a particularly nasty one that you can get just by looking at an infected web site! It can only reliably be eradicated by re-installing Windows. Fortunately my son Scott was visiting and he undertook to reformat the hard drive and start again from scratch. Just as fortunately, I didn't lose any information. What I did lose, of course, was time. I'm only just catching up on things now.

To add insult to injury, I was not sure where I'd picked up the trojan, and to be fair, my machine appeared to have been infected with something for several weeks, because it was running extremely slowly and some processes had become unreliable. However, I returned to the web site I'd been looking at when my AV notified me of the infection and to my horror I picked up - wait for it - two more trojans! The AV was on the job and has, I hope, eradicated both of them.

I had no idea trojans could be passed on in this way. I imagine the hackers have done something to the site's cookies. It's sad that such people can't turn what is obviously a fine talent for software development to something that might benefit the world.

This was not, my friends, the best possible start to the New Year. I hope yours was better! I'll try to blog during the week if I catch up with commitments - and don't meet any more wooden horses!