I was chatting with my girlfriend earlier tonight when she told me of a strange occurance with her computer at school. Not quite what to make of it myself, so I thought I'd run it by my fellow AO folks.

Apparently earlier today, she was using her computer, and on either Google or Yahoo at the time. For a moment, she turned around to talk to one of her roommates and when she turned back around, her screen had turned blue (though not the typical Blue Screen of Death) with a message that said 'You have the RPC Doom Virus'. Also on this screen apparently were Yes/No buttons and some question relating to those...don't remembe exactly what. Instead, she just clicked the X to close the window. I Googled around to try and find some info about this message, but I didn't find anything decent. I'm pretty sure she doesn't have an antivirus program installed, nor a firewall (and yes, I've harped on her plenty about that). So what could be the cause of this? Could it be that she's infected by one of the many MyDoom's out there or could it be just a normal pop-up? Is there even a such thing as an 'RPC Doom Virus'? She is on ResNet at school, so that's why I worry.

Briefly, also today somehow her IE start page managed to get changed from being set on mail.yahoo.com to this exact page: www.syspage.com/ads/homepagesai.php?id=start1. Attached is a JPEG of the exact page that she saw (with some identifing info edited out). Now, I'm not so concerned with the actual page itself as browsers have a bad habit of giving away tons of info and it's an ad screen. I'm just curious as to how it could have been automatically changed without her doing anything. Any thoughts on that?

Her machine: P2 300, 64 MB ram (I think), Win98 (possibly SE), not sure which version of IE.

Thanks in advance as any help or light shedding would be appreciated And I apologize for the potential vague-ness as I'm unable to actually take a look at her machine myself (damn these long distance relationships!!)

alpha