Cyanosis, nihil, steve.milner, EaseZE

Thank you all for your responses. Each of your responses were appropriate.

FYI...I stopped the unwanted connections by uninstalling iMesh; took out spy data with Spybot, etc. Think I'll finally resort to nihil's reformatting option to give the computer an overhaul. Am seriously thinking about EaseZE's suggestion about lowering the privileges of the computer user...we'll see.