If I freaked out everytime one of my HDDs made a noise, I'd be sitting in the corner of my room under a blanket, my arms around my knees.. shaking back and forth and humming.
Haha!

Yeah i often get wierd noises but this was going on at the same time as this stuff was happening and i didn't have any any antivirus running or anything. Like i said it stopped as soon as i unplugged my modem......well it slowly stopped over about five seconds or so, as if something had just been downloaded or something.

I don't really know that much about computer security though, but i'm learning bit's as i go along. I know what you mean about noises, i get them quite a lot, but this was just one long continous noise as opposed to the occasional noise that lasts 5 seconds or so. I know that there's a lot more to security than just having a firewall and and antivirus but after reading about twenty tutorials here, (including all of the windows ones except XP etc in negatives list in the tutorials section) i'm still not sure about where to go from here.

One problem is that i don't own any books, i've just been learning from the net, when i get some money and get a book or two i'm sure i'll understand it a lot more.

Cheers for the help, am hoping to get a book like the one in the link you gave in your post !mitation, the drive by shooting analogy sounds like it might fit!

I can get XP from my stepdad, so i'll maybe install that, but this computer is pretty slow so i'll see how it handles it.