For example, Linda Anderson is using a computer infected with W32.Klez.H@mm. Linda is not using an antivirus program or does not have the current virus definitions. When W32.Klez.H@mm performs its emailing routine, it finds the email address of Harold Logan. The worm inserts Harold's email address into the "From:" portion of an infected message, which the worm then sends to Janet Bishop. Then, Janet contacts Harold and complains that he sent her an infected message, but when Harold scans his computer, Norton AntiVirus does not find anything because his computer is not infected.

Clean yourself up with this tool from symantec.

So it probably wasn't my machine that had Klez.H at all but someone who had my email address on hand. I'm working through the probables now.

Issue 1 : I went to Leadtek's site last night and downloaded the latest drivers and software for my card. I've heard rumours of a version of the software that has a pre-setting for SVCD and CVD and I wanted to play with it.

Got new drivers (which were actually the old drivers but that's another story), went to XP Hardware, Media Devices, Clicked on the Video Capture driver, clicked "Update Driver..." All went spiffy until the last second when I received error "Hardware could not be installed due to the following error : Access is denied".

After much searching and re-trying I discovered that HP printer users have had similar problems. It seems that the installation software incorrectly sets the permissions in the XP registry so that the driver, as OWNER of the files, cannot access the registry settings it needs when you go to reinstall. HP has a solution involving setting permissions in regedit. I tried that for my drivers but couldn't reset the CREATOR OWNER permissions. It didn't solve my problem anyway. After about 3 hours I ended up using XP's System Restore utility to dump my system back to 7pm and just use the old drivers.

Issue 2 : Audio sync and the 1920's video. The pre-sets for the tv2000xp work fairly well. VCD quality is OK but a little jumpy and doesn't convert properly to a burnt VCD (jumpy sound). DVD quality is excellent but Tmpgenc won't convert it to SVCD because it's MPEG2. Uncompressed worked for a while but occationally results in unsynced sound and video randomly playing at twice speed. Many a trial and error had me find a copy of "Virtual VCR" and use that instead of the provided software. This way I could see the dropped frames rate and various other stats like transfer rate.

Unfortunately it seems despite my ultra fast hard drive I was still dropping frames. About 1 per 1000 frames in 5 frame clumps. This no matter wait the quality (compressed to 5mb/s or uncompressed at 30mb/s).

I eventually found one that was working well but was a little flickery in bits, like it was trying to catch the video up to the sound. Not really acceptable for what I want to do (replace soundtracks to existing videos with minidisc recorded sound).

I gave up and went to bed.

To add to all that I ended up getting the dreaded crackles coming through my soundcard at some points, although I suspect that may have been the video capture card, not the soundcard. Tonight I'm going to follow the advice of just about everyone and bypass my video card completely and capture sound directly to the audio card. Apparently the videocard is mono only anyway.

It seems my audio card is sharing IRQ with IRQ USB sharing again (which ends up being the scanner, my only USB device). I suspect this should be easily fixed by unplugged the scanner when I want to record. XP does at least reboot very quickly and most of the time a reboot isn't required anyway.

What's next : Lots it seems. Good forums around for this sort of thing.

It seems only a few HP printer users have had the "Access is denied" error when using the hardware wizard in XP. If anyway has a nice solution to this problem please let me know.

A lot of people have suggested replacing my video drivers with those from IU Labs and using their iuVCR software to capture. Apparently most video capture cards are based on buggy drivers. At the very least I'll be able to capture at SVCD quality with the new drivers. Although I suspect I'm going to have "access is denied" problems when attempting to replace them. Narf.

Other options including disabling write cache on my hard-disk (not sure I can), making sure IE (and any explorer windows) are closed to reduce CPU usage (although Task Manager informs me I only get to around 50% usage even when compressing on the fly), using AVI_IO software which specialises in keeping audio synced even when frames are dropped.

Lots of experimentation to go. Was kind of wishing that it would all just work first go but that isn't the Bowie way. At least it isn't broken.