I haven't had problems prviewing with VLC. Admitedly it can be a little slow to open sometimes.
If you have doubts about the file, then don't downld it. If you can't preview it then you don't know what you might end up with. And that's a long time & effort to find out. I personally wouldn't trust any file named that way. Why would people name files like that in normal circumstances. I believe the name is computer generated.

By the way, may I suggest you investigate some utilities to keep your computer safe.

1. ad-ware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ (FREE)

2. Spybot - Search & Destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html (FREE)

3. Peerguardian: http://peerguardian.methlabs.org/pg2.html (FREE)

Ok then,

How do you preview with VLC??

It seems that my default thingy is either Limewire (for Audio) or Windows media player for movies and I'm not sure what I can do about it.

I have Ad-aware and Spybot (also a couple of other things) but not peer guardian.

Thanks for all your help

Hugs, Lindy xxxxx

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Peerguardian is a little like a spyware except it stops known organisations like the riaa, fbi, etc, from browsing your computer. It gets updated every now & again with new addresses to block out.

People should stay away from any spam they find be it the clearoutclub site or any other advert. www.clearoutclub is the one for the iPods from memory.

To set up VLC as your default video player, see: Setting Default video app

Great pic by the way, very cute! (What type are they?)

Just to save me from re-posting this image time & time again, I've included it here as an example. As you can see this was a rubbish search & got back rubbish spam. In the 1st example I had wmv filtered out. Get to recognise the file sizes. Almost always from T1 sources.



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O.K. I've read the thread but it has not answered my question, or I'm too thick to follow the thread, but - I uploaded a straight forward image of my dog. The file name was Dobie X.jpg.
When I searched for that file I found it and downloaded it. And all I got was an advert for iPods!
Now, I have nothing to do with spam and I know nothing about iPods, so how did the image get changed?

alan.fairhurst you haven't read the thread clearly enough & nor have you read the links left by members to explain what happens. ie: automated search results means that any search you do will come up with wmv & jpg results of the same name & of the above sizes. These should be ignored. Recognising this issue is what you need to do. Majority of these results come from T1 sources & are more often than not in the majority of results found.

These spams don't just come from spurious search results. Sometimes one gets legitimate search results (i.e. they are not from a T1 source, have only one or a handful of sources, and the filename isn't a simple derivative of your query) but downloading them results in a spam. It looks like the download "mesh" gets polluted too, and when you try to download a file from a "real" search result, sometimes a spammer gets in at that point and substitutes junk.

If Limewire sent hashes with search results and checked files against search result hashes it would catch these with "File corrupted", but it doesn't -- and lots of other broken files don't get detected either. Looks like it trusts the host sending the file to be honest about the hash and the file.

Thanks for the replies. I'm not very PC savvy but with your help I'm learning.

(Corrupt files is a different topic.) Um the images I posted on page 1 seem to show differently. But everybody for their own experiences. I've never seen any spam of any other size than those listed (well within 1 KB.) If you're looking for small wmv files then you're probably looking for porn. If that be the case then good luck. Sounds like you've unwittingly selected the wrong file to downld & then been surprised at the end to find it's spam. Either filter it out or be aware of the file size. It really is too obvious to the average user who has been using LW for any length of time.

Spurious search results need to be dealt with by ultrapeers rejecting them, not by end users blocking hosts. Blocking the spammers is a band-aid -- they've shown themselves able to move around and acquire a lot of network addresses -- somehow -- and anyway, the bogus results compete with legitimate results for limited network bandwidth. Ultrapeers need to start doing some sort of automated bitzi lookup or something, and when they have to pass on only a subset of the search results they've received, they can then dump the n lowest-rated results. So when search results get dropped, the spam will get dropped first.