After panicking Saturday night over the whole, "omg, I've killed my computer" thing, I discovered that I was fast enough, thanks to Zone Alarm's version of a panic button, to keep it from infecting my computer. Don't know if it was just that that saved me or a combo of patches, anti-virus protection, the firewall, and my quick shut down. I've managed to get through it without a reformat.

All scans now come back totally clean. I've run it through both NAV and the online free version of Kaspersky. That should be the end of that problem.

My computer caught a virus (or a trojan horse or a worm -- haven't yet determined) last night when I went to the Heliopolis archive. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I knew that someone was targeting one of the QaF archives but I never thought about this thing targeting other archives as well. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I immediately went to Zone Alarm and shut down all internet activity, the computer froze, and I hard rebooted while running to the other room to shut off the modem.

The damage was done, though, because now neither the keyboard nor the mouse work with the CPU. I'm assuming the drivers have been messed with - but I only know how to boot into safe mode from the keyboard. Luckily, we have two computers so I'll be spending this morning verifying what bug I probably have and trying to figure out what I can do about it. Grrrrrrr. In all my years online, this is the 1st one I've gotten and I am kicking myself for not being more suspicious.

ETA: If anyone has suggestions or knowledge, please feel free to share. I'm at a loss on how to even log into windows without a keyboard or mouse. Thanks!