Eradicating parasites

[canetoad]

I have a habit of getting up at 3am or so and getting in a few hours work. Last week I had a book layout to finish and so spent several hours on it using Illustrator, InDesign etc. - most of the Adobe CS3 suite. Come 9am it was time to pack it up, transfer to flash drive and go into the office.

The error message said something like 'Document.indd cannot be copied as it is still in use by a program'. Damn that! All programs were shut down. Rather than rip out the flash drive, I rebooted, prepared to copy again, then found I'd lost the whole night's work. All folders were empty. Three or four file recovery programs failed to restore more than a couple of partial jpegs. I alternated between feeling sick and faint, then did the whole lot again.

While I still can't pinpoint exactly which process kept running, my suspicions were towards the stuff that runs in the background in Adobe CS3. Investigation pointed me to the Bonjour Service - something you don't know is running and if you did, have no way to shut off or disable.

Searching found this page, with instructions and tools to remove all sorts of things that operate in the background and are hard to eradicate such as Norton's, Windows Messenger, Nero & Net Framework.

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/02/10/how-to-uninstall-or-remove-bonjour-mdnsresponderexe/"