Me writes:

> Not chicken little and not in need of medication. I don't use my real name
>  in any newsgroups to avoid having my email overrun & spammed etc..

I use my real name in a fair number of newsgroups and I get no great deal of
spam. It isn't as bad as most people suspect that it is. But then again, I
use AOL as my address for public postings and they've gotten very good at
detecting and deleting nonsense before it ever gets to me.



>  A firewall such as ZoneAlarm will in fact block the keyboards internet
>  access.
>  Zone alarm was how I detected the keyboards attempts to access the net in
>  the first place.
>
>  After contacting HP I was told (excerpt from their response): "I can assure
>  you that we are not gathering any more information from you than other
>  websites do when you visit them.  I am sure you understand this about
>  cookies so I will not elaborate."
>
>  Cookies are browser controlled and as such have no real access to the
actual
>  machine thus no way of gathering system information. And cookies can be
>  disabled. The keyboard driver is a system diver and as such has complete
>  access to all information on the system.
>
>  As I said zone alarm can block the access but I don't believe we should we
>  be forced to block something that shouldn't be there in the first place.
>
>  To the person mentioning the Microsoft keyboard - Thanks - I had considered
>  replacing the HP one with a MS one - now I know that doesn't solve the
>  problem.

The solution to your problem is to wipe your discs clean and re-install an
uncorrupted version of Windows -- and never buy an HP PC again. For more
details on your problem, see:

     http://www.optc.com/Webbot/Thread20044.html

The thread is inverted. To make maximal sense of it, please read it from the
bottom.

Wirt Atmar