I am running Windows NT 4.0 and have found that many people are trying to break into my system from the internet. After increasing Windows NT security, the Event viewer showed that there were lots of failed login attempts. Then, having installed Black Ice firewall, I found 280 suspicious hits in 90 minutes. However, to surf the internet I have to disable the firewall otherwise it will not let me surf at all no matter what level of security I have set. Since installing Black Ice my system has become unstable and crashes on a regular basis. I am sure that I have a hacker in my system and every time I log on to the internet the hacker must be sending out packets as I immediately get suspicious activity from all over the world. My feeling is that this person must be using my machine to break into other networks. Every time I restart my PC I get two logons to my own profile and an anonymous login which does not exist and I cannot remove. This is becoming a bad joke and I know the solution is to re-format the disk. Do you have any suggestions before I do reformat?

You are right in saying that you will probably have to reformat your hard drive. Unfortunately, I cannot offer any advice on your problem without seeing your computer myself to assess the current security and account settings and determine what might be the problem. However, as you are receiving so many suspicious hits it would be highly undesirable to disable the firewall (which you have been doing) in order to use the internet. So, really you have little option other than to back up all of the data you wish to keep, make sure you have all of your system and application disks at hand, and do a full reformat your hard drive.