I had a virus, and not the kind you think!

I can't believe what a day I have had with my computer! Here is how it goes.....

We start out this morning taking the 15 year old cat to the vet for the update on the rabies shot. Yes, herding two kids and a hissy cat to the vet was interesting to say the least.

For the last several weeks, I have been at an absolute loss as to what to do for JM's birthday which is coming up very soon. We thought about doing a bowling alley but realized that was a bit out of our price range. In the past, we have done a very fun pizza parlor, but we have done that a couple of times plus he has outgrown that a bit.

As we are chatting in the car, I ask what he would think of a roller skating rink. Yahoo! All for it. I come home, do a search (who needs the yellow pages) for the roller skating rink I have in mind, make a call, voila. We are booked. It will be about the same price as what we have spent at the pizza parlor in year's past.

Now, we have to get hopping on invitations. Since JM doesn't have school this week because of conferences, I thought I might find some on the internet, personalize them, and start getting them out. It would be a nice project right? Project, yes. Fun for he and I? Ummm...no way.

With him standing next to me after doing a benign search like "skating invitations free", I find the google listing of several and click on one. Let me tell ya....it wasn't kids invitations that came up. It was pornography, pure and simple. I yelped and clicked something to make it go away. He's standing right next to me! It didn't go away. The popups began like lightning bolts. I suddenly have new icons in my start up menu. I have Explore, which I don't use, suddenly opening telling me I have spyware and I should use this site "puresafety.com" to download their spyware. I just didn't trust that at all. I have all kinds of panic going on.

No worries. We use McAfee, and I just need to go to their site and do a scan with their latest and greatest. The spyware won't let me go to their site. I do a search to get to their site, and I need to upgrade my virus stuff with them, but the spyware won't let me check out. I cried, I literally sat at my computer and cried.

Technical support! Three online chats with them gets something going. After two hours of hit and misses, I am finally doing an upgraded scan from DOS that they talked (typed) me through. I was advised to do the scan twice. It found three trojans! Each scan took at least an hour.

Reboot the computer, the nightmare is still there. Popups, puresafety.com is now my homepage, warnings, alarms, and more tears. I get back with tech support and they tell me to contact the "Virus Removal Team". Ghostbusters! Here we go!

You have to pay for this kind of support. Worst case, they hack into your computer remotely and pick the bugger out themselves, but that costs $60.00. I opted for the less expensive option first, that was talking to a person who walked me through it for $3.95 a minute and it took about ten minutes. After almost the whole day has been shot doing this, it was worth it.

Get this! She had me to go www.bleepingcomputer.com and walk me through one of their scans! I asked her if I had problems later, could I access this account without paying $3.95 a minute to talk to her. She said yes, so let me share the love! This is a site that McAfee uses to get rid of nasty spyware!

I feel suddenly very clean now. My computer is squeaking, it's so clean. and I think I just paid the most amount of money I will ever pay for birthday party invitations, and we haven't even gotten them yet. The Dollar Tree is on the list of places to hit tomorrow after this nightmare.

I am going to bed soon. I will sleep pretty well while new gray hairs pop out of my head.