What just happened here?

[kguest]

I could be wrong but I have felt for a while that an old business partner might be spying on my computer use. I've just turned off remote assistance, we shared a domain that I need to uninstall. I then found a file named SHELLNEW which made me think that perhaps he had worked in a back door, but all that was in it was old office apps that he installed. The weird thing is that shortly after I closed the file, a file popped up in a Windows Live Format we used with the domain, and it had a sentence from a news article that started with the word, "Shells" What's up?

[nihil]

Hi there, and welcome to AO

As far as I am aware "ShellNew" is something to do with the context menu of Windows Explorer (right mouse click options), and has been around since Windows 95 at least?

Of itself, it is harmless, I would have thought; and it might be that he set it up to give him an option to choose what application to open office type files with?

Obviously, that doesn't mean that he hasn't installed something malicious, but I cannot understand why he would install it there. Perhaps you might experiment a bit with opening Windows Explorer and right clicking on various filetypes to see what options the context menu brings up?