Everyone,
 
I am sending this e-mail to everyone in my HOTMAIL e-mail address book.  Last week I believe that you may have received 2 (or more) e-mails from me.  It is my belief that these were SPAM of some type.  I am not sure what was being harvested or what was being done other than sending e-mails to people in your address book.
 
I hope that you DID NOT click on the link, but some of you may have done so.  I AM SORRY THAT I WAS SPOOFED.  I believe that I have corrected my issue.  I used 2 tools to complete this task.  
 
TOOL #1 was CCLEANER.  This can be found at http://download.cnet.com/ccleaner/ .  YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY FOR IT.  Simply install.  During the install it will ask if you want to make CHROME your default browser and to add a GOOGLE bar to your browser.  I would recommend that you UNCHECK both of these and NOT install those options.  After the program is installed you need to CLEAN the files ("Cleaner - Run Cleaner" - option).  Run that 2 times.  Then when that finishes, you need to select "REGISTRY" and then ANALYZE, then "FIX".  This should be repeated until it reports that your registry is clean (or atleast reports the same few entries).

TOOL #2 was MALWAREBYTES.  This can be found at http://www.malwarebytes.org/ . YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY FOR IT.  Simply install.  After the program is installed you need to perform a FULL SCAN.  If it finds anything, I recommend that you DELETE, PURGE, EXPUNGE, or whatever term they use to say get this OFF MY MACHINE. This should be repeated until it reports that you do not have any issues on your computer.
 
Finally, I changed by HOTMAIL password after this was completed.  I am not sure which fixed the problem, I just know that now things appear to be better.


Scott T. Petersen