Minutus

One interesting and distressing thing about this latest bunch of viruses
(bugbear and Klez) is that if your computer has ever been infected, for
however short a time, apparently your e-mail stays in circulation forever --
even though the virus is no longer on your machine. It slipped by an older
version of Norton Utilities on my machine several months ago, and as soon
as I realized it (within 5 minutes), I unplugged the machine and ran a virus
cleansing program. (I also updated my Norton!). But I continue, months
later, not only to receive new messages infected with the virus (which
Norton faithfully "quarantines"), but also returned messages tainted by the
virus purportedly sent from me that apparently had been sent out by other
infected computers (Norton quarantines these too). Apparently the virus
hijacked my name from that one brief infection and keeps it in circulation.
As long as the virus is still being transmitted via unprotected computers
anywhere in the world, I guess this will continue to happen. Extremely
annoying, but I don't know there's anything to be done other than keeping
virus protection software up to date. I'm glad that the Yahoo server
bounces viruses -- that's a help. Rosemary