Maroni,

I respect your paranoia, but I don't think you have anything to worry about. Viruses can live on a boot sector, but this a rather old school approach. Furthermore, they don't have any network level capabilities from that layer. Typically, these types of viruses will copy themselves to the boot sector of other drives, but the functionality is usually limited to modifying/deleting files. Formatting a drive may not erase a boot sector virus but it will definitely eradicate a trojan that requires an operating system to exist.

I suspect you are on a broadband connection that uses a shared medium such as Comcast's cable internet service. If so, your traffic LED is constantly flashing because the physical medium is shared with everyone in your general area. In this case, you will see a lot of broadcast traffic i.e. arp broadcasts and netbios broadcasts.

You should also keep in mind that everybody knows the IP space of the major broadband networks and they are heavily targeted. Very few home users take the steps to properly secure their systems, which makes these networks a hot spot for attackers looking for zombies etc. Port scanners are constantly running on this IP space, which will generate a fair amount of traffic to your computer (hence causing your traffic LED to blink a lot). The LED on my cable modem blinks even when my PC is off! This is why you should be sure to install a firewall of some sort. I’ve used the free version of ZoneAlarm and have been relatively satisfied with it. Keep in mind that any locally installed firewall will interfere with IPSEC/PPTP VPN connections. You can also use Microsoft’s integrated Internet Firewall if you use Win 2K or XP.

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/conten...id=zadb_zadown

Hope this helps,
_TOMDAQ