Quote Originally Posted by Phar_Ted
And the thing is is that I keep as best I can to eliminate spyware and such, but they are very persistant.

I just put IE behind my firewall again, so I'll see if slows down (the ads), Firefox is much better, my first step to open license. Seems when I give IE permission to run I get swamped with ads and spyware.
LOL!!! If you use IE or Outlook you are just begging for problems. Not that not using them will save you from all issues, but these are well known weak points. And although you think things are behind your software filewall, the truth is that much of the buggy winsows TCP/IP stack remains exposed and must process incoming packets before they ever get to your software filrewall. With a router you have a NAT firewall system (maybe more, some routers also do nice things like stateful packet inspection). The router has to decide which of the computers on the Local Network to send packets to. If you are visiting a website, for example, it knows which computer sent the request so it know where to forward the incoming packets (this should make it clear that the router can't protect you if you visit websites owned or attacked by evil hackers). But if a hacker just is searching the Internet for vulnerable systems (which happens all of the time), the router will have no reason to forward unexpected packets to any local system and, unless you tell it otherwise, will discard them. The packets can't infect your computer if they don't reach it.