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This past week has been a challenging week for me when it comes to using my computer. Last weekend my desktop got infected with a Trojan called VirtuMonde (read about it here ) and it took me almost the whole weekend to finally get rid of it. And then today I discovered how my laptop's Windows XP registry got messed up for some unknown reason. That took me another hour or so to get it fixed. And it was only made possible by a stroke of luck. I'll explain as we go along.

If you use Windows XP and have multiple user profile on the same computer, you may experience an issue whereby when a user logs off and the screen will go blank for a long time before it goes back to the welcome screen where you choose the user profile. During that time, there seems to be nothing you can do but stare at the blank screen. The usual Alt-Ctrl-Del combination does not respond either. If you are patient enough you can wait, for several minutes before it will finally return to the welcome screen.

For those of you who uses GMail or Yahoo Mail, you probably wish there is an easier way to check your mail numerous times a day without having to open a browser each time to do that. It would be nice if you can just click once and you are in the favorite web-based email program. Well, there is a solution for you. Bubbles to the rescue.

Remote Access software has certainly come quite a way compared to a few years ago. I still remember using remote access software like PCAnywhere, and thought it was neat even then to be able to control another computer remotely as if you are there. One drawback of most of these software was that you had to install software on both ends. The problem with such approach is that often the computer you are using to access the remote computer does not even belong to you sometimes. You borrow it for a quick access to your remote computer. And this limitation of needing to install the client version of the software in order to access the remote host computer, makes it an inconvenient way to access your computer remotely.

Just this last couple of days, I noticed something that I haven't noted before when I started my Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). After IE was loaded, it just sits there blank, with the word connecting... while trying to load my homepage (which was www.yahoo.com). Eventually the homepage loaded but sure took a long time. Once the page is loaded, clicking any links within the page will load ok just like normal. The same thing happened when I open another tab window. I timed the whole process and it took around 90 seconds before the first page eventually gets loaded.