Thanks for responing and so quickly Bob. In answer to your questions: 1.I dwonloaded LW from their site. 2, I have ad-aware, spybot, spyblaster ( which I will run now) and NOD anti-virus which is constantly running. 3, I have XP with SP2 with it's built in firewall and a 9 month old decent computer (1Ghz cpu and 256 RAM). 4, since discovering the unauthorised usage I have set a few preferences in the options ie not connect on start up, shutdown after transfers. Apart from that I have not configured it to my system. I'll let you know if the spyware searches turn up anything. Thanks, Alan (from australia.)