By the way, you obviously know what you're talking about. Somehow managed to land myself with W32.Alcra.B virus. This virus also attempts to disable some pieces of hardware too, for example my CDRW drive aswell as running Limewire at every opportunity. It took some shifting too, had to disable the the system restore, adopt safe mode and then run a virus scan to completely remove it.

Thank you very much for your help. If anyone else has this problem then go to symantec's website, it gives excellent details on how to remove this little blighter.

Cheers BB