Obviously you can re-infect yourself but at least you have the opportunity to see what the "old" computer was like before *having* to reformat. In my own case I may have been too paranoid and jsut had the old windoze sluggishness combined with several other things. It has taken the best part of a week to get it working again due to not having any restore points.

And I still don't know if my MBR is OK!

Perhaps this could help--firefox mozilla backup
sorry-- I am not that familiar yet with firefox. I do sympathize, believe me. I have been through this several times myself... it's (unfortunately) how you learn about this stuff

http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

I don't know what happend in the past week, but when you turned of system restore you suspected you only had an ZA update problem. Nothing serious. And you , just like the instructions say , have to turn system restore back on when youre clean/done.
Wich you did a week ago:

So you should have a system restore point to go back to from a week ago.


BTW , that nothing happends when you click on "update" in ZA is normal when you have it set to automaticly check for updates. So infact you didn't had any problems at all when you disabled and reenabled system restore.

I'm sorry to hear about the problems you had though.

There *were* other things as well - for example I noticed that the computer may have sent out 20MB one session, icons seemed to change to other programs' icons, one or two files attempted to open with "wrong" programs and so on. I was just getting a bit twitchy about my system!

BTW, when you try to switch Restore off, it tells you that you are going to permanently delete all the restore points - so you either leave it on or lose the lot!

I will never switch restore off again unless I have completely satisfied myself that my system is beyond redemption and I am about to reformat! So long as you are aware that the restore points might be compromised and behave accordingly it does more harm than potential good to get rid of them.