The good news:  I still have never had a computer get infected with an email virus while using Lotus Notes.  That 18-year run is still going.

The bad news:  My laptop got a virus through a random act of browsing.  It happened thanks to a touch pad strategically located between the palms of the hands where it can occasionally cause the mouse to move or misread a mouse click.  It has happened many times in the past.  I’m typing away when suddenly the cursor jumps to somewhere else on the screen and my typing starts appearing in the wrong place.  This time it went to the browser window and who knows what input it took before I stopped typing.  It’s the first time being a fast typist was a liability for me.  I just know that suddenly I started getting a chain of popups.

I closed everything and it didn’t look like anything evil happened, but since then my computer started crashing randomly and would never come out of hibernation properly.  A full virus scan revealed a problem, but it needed the help of a Norton Anti-virus bootable CD.  OK, I created the bootable CD from another computer and ran the repair tool.  After that the PC quit booting altogether.  This was a case where the cure was worse than the illness.  No, it won’t even restore to a previous recovery point.  Sure, I could resort to a system image recovery that I made some time ago, but there are no guarantees of recovery at that point.  Who knows what devilry is at work with the Norton tool and virus.

I put in a call to Norton support and pretty quickly the guy at the other end decided to escalate this one to the next level.  They actually scheduled a time the support guy would call back.  This is going to be a true test of Norton’s support service.  I’ll keep you posted.  Meanwhile, the blog will continue to be quiet thanks to this new time-sucking event.