When I finish checking my email in Outlook Express I go to the bottom right hand corner of my screen and click onto the icon of two little computers there to log off. A box then comes up on the screen where I click a button to log off. However, the line marked ‘Bytes Received’ is ticking away into the millions and the line marked ‘Bytes Sent’ is still ticking away into the hundreds of thousands! This occurs even when I don’t have any other applications open and I am just looking at my e-mail. Where are all these bytes going and how can I stop it? What have I done wrong! I am using Windows 98.

You’ll be glad to know that you have done nothing wrong. It looks like some application running in the background of your computer is having some internet activity. I am intrigued to know which application is actually doing this. As you have not opened any other applications, it is probably a program which is running in the system tray (the icons next to the clock) or is running completely in the background. The best way to find out which application is accessing the internet is to download an application called ZoneAlarm. This is a very good internet firewall and has the feature that asks for your permission for any application to use the internet before it allows that application access so you know which applications are using the internet including which background program is trying to access the internet. ZoneAlarm is free for personal use and can be downloaded from www.zonealarm.com (click the ZoneAlarm Free Download button). There is also ZoneAlarm Pro which is a more fully featured version of ZoneAlarm and costs US$39.95. However, this isn’t necessary in your case so the free version will be fine. Once you have downloaded and installed ZoneAlarm (you may need to restart your computer), connect to the internet and check your email. ZoneAlarm will ask you for permission for Outlook Express to access the internet. Grant this permission for Outlook Express to access the internet (you can click ‘Always Remember…’ if you don’t want to have to grant it permission every time you wish to use the program). Sometime (it may even be before you open Outlook Express) a program or programs other than Outlook Express will ask for permission to access the internet. Such programs are probably the ones which are causing the internet activity and the increase in bytes received and sent. If you know what these applications are and want them to access the internet, then grant them permission. However, if you don’t know what they are (or they look suss) then I suggest that you deny them permission (as for all you know it could be a Trojan horse virus trying to call home). I suggest that you keep ZoneAlarm installed as it is a very good firewall. Remember, don’t give a program permission to access the internet if you don’t know what it is or you didn’t open it yourself. However, sometimes you may find that you have to grant a program which you don’t know much about permission as it may be a Windows process and if you don’t give it permission it may cause a Windows component to crash. Only give it permission once you have established that it is a Windows process (eg. because it crashes something). If you deny an application access and there are no consequences (eg. crashes) then you can probably safely deny it permission every time it asks.