This afternoon, steveo_h managed to get rid of another network cable (temporarily, at least) by selling it to Laura, who I knew in the hall two years ago. Why she came back to the hall after finally escaping from it is something of a mystery, but still - we got her ResNet connection up and running.

Ten minutes later, her computer had been infected with the Sasser virus and all sorts of rather nasty spyware. That must be something of a record. So after dinner I was down there with downloaded removal instructions and all the software that I'd learned about in the past week (looking back, my spyware disaster was something of an advantage.) The whole process took hours - I hadn't realised just how nasty the virus is. It clogs up the whole system, slowing everything down, with the underlying panic that if you don't get in to Explorer soon and make the necessary changes, the countdown will start again.

On top of that, there were roughly sixty million unneccessary processes running. I think she'd been spyware-infected for some time and just hadn't realised it. In the end we came out victorious with just the minor problem of a DLL file missing, as it had been somehow modified by the virus and sent to quarantine by Norton. The only problem that remained was coming back and explaining to whinknee why I'd been in another girl's room for the entire evening.