Weekend from Hell

Well, I got a lovely new education in all things related to computer basics. Sigh. I ...who uses Norton, quick scans daily, full scans weekly, never clicks on links or opens attachments unless I expect to get them...I...I...got a bloody virus, worm, trojan or whatever form of malware. I had seen some suspicious 'bounces' that could have been spoofs but bothered me because they weren't quite like any spoof I'd seen before. Then comcast told me yep, spam was coming from my computer. So I spent one full day running McAffee and Norton, Trend Micro, and Rootkit Revealer. Nothing. So. Spent part of another day backing up everything I could think of. Then did the reformat the hard drive and reinstall windows. Sigh. All kinds of problems, including a missing disk with the driver for the ethernet card on it. So I had to open the bloody computer case and find the manufacturer of the motherboard (no separate ethernet card) for my son in Wisconsin, who then found the drivers online, sent them to his friend who lives nearby (I had no internet of course) who brought them over on a flash drive to install them. I do have a disk now. And then of course I had all those waiting microsoft downloads and then I had to spend a half hour with comcast while the tech figured out how to get my email back again. But hey, I have a new computer, I know a whole lot more about hunting around for things, thanks to my son's patient hand holding on the phone, and I know my computer literally inside and out. Boy was it dusty! So I guess I have a new computer. Let us hope I NEVER have to do that again. I wish I'd had a blood pressure monitor. I bet mine was awesome for much of the weekend.