Being the geek that I am, I spotted some errant processes in my process table. (Yes, I pretty much have an idea of what processes are supposed to be there.) I immediately found a directory with curious CCC.exe in it, and wiped all that out, but figured that was not the end of it. I caught a few more files, and sort of limped along for a week.

Then this weekend, I spotted some more suspects and did another round of hunting. This involved pulling out several DLLs from windows/system32 and when one got especially tough to gouge out, I started blasting away at the registry.

Bad move.

Now my computer powers up, examines it navel for quite some time, then spouts off about lsass - service not found. It gives me an OK button to push, which is not ok, but I don't have anything else to do, so I push it, and of course it reboots. After five or six rounds of this, I realize that its not going to do anything different no matter how many times I tell it that its ok so I just power down and pull the hard drive out to get at the important stuff, like Chuck - epsiode 3.

Actually, everything of real value lives on the SVN server, or in Google Docs, so I'm not really all that excited about this setback, just a little annoyed. This week is going to be filled with hours of joy as I hunt down my recovery CD, and the install disks for all those ancient artifacts called Applications.

Ok, from now on I only browse the internet from linux. Or my Nokia N770, which I can't find. Ok, my used Nokia N800 that I won on ebay, which isn't here yet, but should be arriving any day now and it better work this time.