Hey, thanks for the quick replies. First, I am planning on aggressively cleaning out any lingering viruses when I have time (I work 2 jobs) and as long as IE stays blocked most of the time I don't have a lot of trouble. Second, if I was to go to the neighbor who's brain isn't all that large and even mention the word encrypt he'd wonder at what cemetary we would do it !! He mostly hasn't done anything with his connection because he is completely clueless on how to anyways. I did find out what happened by snooping around so I thought I would close this for anyone else with the problem. As I said, I have Kaspersky and Spybot. The Kaspersky is the full paid for version and pretty aggressive when it comes to a firewall. The Spybot is a free download and candy coats its firewall with the cute little word "teatimer". Who would have guessed. Apparantly it was the aggressive Kaspersky updating and his bad boy firewall was just beating the crap out of the wittle teatimer which was just a major conflict. 24 hours later I got rid of the teatimer when I was desperately looking for a solution (At the time I thought that maybe someone else was using the puter here and may have just blocked the browser when the pop came up asking if to allow or to deny access not knowing what they were doing. I'm the only one in the house who knows their way around in there and handles it all.) But apparently by shutting down the teatimer the firewalls no longer were in conflict and Kaspersky won the fight. All is ok right now and thanks again for the ideas. One the side- The neighbor has never had trouble with his online going down. For what he pays he shouldn't!!
