The first digi invasion in a long time.

Just when I least expected it, and of course, not at a good time by far, one of our tower computers was invaded with a nasty of the most insidious kind.

[P.O.I.--I do want to point out that it was neither mine, nor of my doing, that the little bugger decided to try to make itself at home.]

Here we were, with company, the holiday bearing down on us, and in the last throes of the 2009 nanowrimo, and then company we most certainly did not want just popped on in and made a nuisance of itself.

I tried all the usual tricks. We seemed to make headway, and then BAM, it flaunted it's AI intelligence by adapting to our attempts to wrench every last egg it tried to lay, so that after each shut down (to complete the removal, ya know), once again, our latest foray would now be a method of attack we could no longer use.

Making matters worse, of course, was the fact that immediately we could not start in safe mode. (Yes, a windows machine.) Quite frustrating in and of itself.

Also frustrating was all the materials I found that pointed towards naming the culprit we seemed to have little luck evicting, none of them seemed to be up to speed on its intelligence level, so I eventually hit a hard brick wall as to where else to go for suggestions.

During our repeated failed attempts at eradication, it really was humbling feeling like we'd forgotten to study for a scheduled test. We shut it off for a while, and tried to ignore the white elephant that also happened to have really creepy antennae hiding in plain sight under the desk.

After we cooled our jets, cooler heads did indeed prevail.

We pulled a few rabbits out of our collective hats, and the menace and its offspring seem to have been swept out with their residual trash, but I still have a bad feeling we missed something.

Time will tell.