Recently I have noticed that my modem is continuously downloading information although the computer is seemingly idle. This occurs without me accessing webpages or downloading any other sort of data. This is irritating because it slows down my computer as well as the internet. By opening the Close Program window, I have been able to isolate the program which I believe is responsible for the problem. By shutting down a program running in the background I am able to prevent any unwanted downloading from occurring. Although this is a workable solution for the meantime, I would like to stop this from happening altogether. Is there any way of discovering what exactly is happening and how to remove this from my system? I believe the problem may stem from spyware or something similar.

You have managed to isolate the program which is causing the unexplained network activity which is a good start. While you probably won’t be able to find out what the program is actually doing when it is accessing the internet, your best bet is to simply stop this program from loading at startup. To do this, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) and press OK. In the window that appears, click the ‘Startup’ tab. On this tab, you will see a list of all the programs which start when Windows loads. Scroll down the list until you find your problem application and then remove the tick from its box. Click the OK button to close the System Configuration Utility. Now restart your computer and the program should no longer start at Windows startup.