Not aliens but Internet Explorer. Luckily I didn’t have much on this one yet. Still, I stupidly forgot to backup my email and bookmarks and save them elsewhere first. I hope the Christmas present I ordered for my daughter comes since I’m not sure I can even find the website again.

Back a while ago when I was offline from Comcast and tried repairing my windows, it wouldn’t even let me log onto my computer because I was not online to activate windows! That is just plain bad management.

This is a new computer. As in a year ago on my birthday I bought all the parts at Newegg to build myself a great graphics computer that will last me forever (it’s going to have to). Unfortunately I apparently had no idea how to build it, so it sat here for over a year. I finally took it to a place in town and said just get it to boot. That was pretty cheap and I came home and installed everything. Other than that one validation glitch we were working like a charm. But I hadn’t gotten around to installing a lot of my graphics programs yet. So a couple of days ago I tried installing one of them and I got the message that I must close Internet Explorer first. What!?!? I don’t even use Internet Explorer but sure enough there it was in my processes. Simple enough, I terminate it. But wait! It pops right back up again. I decide to delete the darn thing. Oh carp, do you know if you have sp3 installed on Win XP you cannot delete Internet Explorer?

I head to Google and spend hours trying to find out what is calling it and forcing it to run, with no luck. I tried renaming it, nope, it just makes it all over again. So I did what any sane person would do, I reformated my drive. Now I have Windows reinstalled, my programs reinstalled and I am NOT going to update to sp3! If that makes security a problem on my computer, have at it.

Now if I can just find out how to make all those idiot speech balloons go away on my desktop and start menu. I did several solutions I found online but I am still getting some. Plus there’s that annoying messenger that won’t die no matter what I do. I told it not to load, I have the service disabled (which ought to be enough by itself), but no, every time I open my email program there it is. I think I am going to try deleting it, but I won’t be surprised if that’s not allowed either.

I don’t mind Microsoft making a program that even the ignorant masses can use but come on, give the rest of us a break!