I’m extremely relieved that the ongoing problems with my daughter’s PC seem to have been rectified and haven’t appeared for a couple of weeks now. Here was the approach I ended up taking :-
1) Buy Zonealarm Security Suite on CD.
2) Reinstall Windows (The SP1 version that came with the PC)
3) Install Zonealarm.
4) Install Broadband Access.
5) Go to Windows Update and install all outstanding updates.
The bit where it had previously gone wrong was step 5. Looking at the ZoneAlarm alert logs, there were over 100 unathorised access attempts while I was trying to get SP2 downloaded (with it’s firewall), of which around a dozen were serious. The internet has got very messy indeed and not a place to enter without a firewall in the way.
Still, good news in the end …