While viewing a website a dialog box appeared asking me to enter details before continuing. After closing the box without entering any details, I received an error message advising that my system had been compromised, or words to that effect. I can’t find anything in Help files to advise what this means, but assume it could be serious. Can you advise how I can check for any problems? A couple of days after this incident, upon closing the Internet connection I received a message looking like a Windows message, saying ‘Get your free credit report now’ - which I guess is an advertisement of some sort. Could this be related? In the meantime, I ran ScanDisk, which took 3 hours and kept restarting with a message that the hard disk was being written to. I then ran Defragmenter
which took 2 hours, with a message coming up on many occasions saying the ‘Drives contents changed. Restarting’. As nothing else was running at the time, I thought this might have something to do with the screensaver - which did come on from time to time. Could this be caused by something else? My operating system is Windows Me.

It was a good move to close the dialogue box that asked for your personal information without entering any of your details. Quite frequently these types of windows are related to advertising/marketing in some way. From what you have told me about the warning message that your system is compromised (that appeared after you closed the box requesting your personal information) I would think this is a Internet Explorer window, which has something to do with advertising - I wouldn’t be too worried about it. The message that looks like a Windows message regarding the free credit report, I can tell you is an advertisement. I have seen many of these on the internet and take little notice of them. It is unlikely that it is related to your restarting problem. However, if you are still concerned about internet security, I strongly recommend that you download and install a firewall of some sort. One of the best (and also free) firewalls is ZoneAlarm (www.zonealarm.com). Regarding your question about ScanDisk and Disk Defragmenter constantly restarting, this is because there is disk activity. You must disable your screen saver before running these applications (otherwise you are in for a long wait while the utilities do their job). Also, while it may appear that all applications are closed, there may still be a few running in the background. Do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and close all non-essential applications (normally the two essential Windows applications are ’systray’ and ‘explorer’).