are you serious? have you ever done any hacking? half a dozen years ago i got into pc's as an enthusiast and mainly for hacking. i never got very far as a sophisticated hacker because the dedication was more than i was willing to put forth at the time but i learned enough from my contact with sophisticated hackers and crackers to get some ideas of what was possible. at the time (and this was during the days of windows 98se and win2k) there were automated programs available any 14 year old with too much time on his hand could use to scan massive amounts of ip addreses for open port vulnerabilities amoung others. once discovered there were fairly easy ways to exploit those vulnerabilities for whatever reason. given the level of sophistication was relatively low to use such programs its conceivable to assume that they have grown in sophistication unimaginably. great hackers have the ability to compromise any system...and i mean any system that is not shut off and absolutely 100% removed from all networks and even then some of them are vulnerable. beleive me its fairly easy to infect systems remotely, randomly and very quickly....especially unprotected ones as the op describes. being infected in a day or two with no firewall or AV is not unreasonable. depending on who is trying to get through. could have been his ip was stored for referance and reused to infect? not sure as i have been out of the loop for years. who do you think employs all the great hackers to get their products or spam on your system? ones like the one that infected the op. the best of the best are working for the NSA or DOD but beleive me that leaves alot of skilled hackers up for employment be careful and use a good firewall that blocks incoming and outgoing conections with good AV program...spyware remover....hijack this....etc...etc.....and practice due dilligance. this will protect you from most of the crap out there today for a year or so. and as a last note turn off system restore. it will store infected settings and files and restore them if they were present at the time. just back up vitals and be prepared to do a complete reformat once a year or so.