Right, well, for one viruses are often backed up cleverly by Windows into System Restore, because apparently it's a smart thing to do. An oft tactic is just to hide in the .cpy archives, since the average user can't do anything about it or even think about looking there because it's apparently "safe".

It's a far smarter idea to disable it, disable *StMgr and keep a manual backup of your hard-disc on a removable device like a Zip Drive or an extra hard disc, since if it's kept on your hard disc, it can be affected by anything that affects your hard disc, simple idea I guess.

And it can't be the modem, since it's an external, brand new Sagem ADSL modem, so why would it have the same problem?

I also currently use Ad-Aware. And Spybot.

Could you explain where the disallow windows to automatically configure stuff thing is, since windows doesn't like people thinking for themselves and using things the way they want to.

I'm using Windows ME by the way, so that in itself may be the problem.