Cheers for the ideas TCS & Memetic,
I'll run the AVG log tonight and have a go with the Winsock program and I'll let you know what happens.
Regarding the patches, I remember opening internet explorer and getting redirected to the Windows automatic update page. It then scanned my system and said that I needed to download these patches for IE. I'll admit, I didnt look particularly closely at the address bar during this, but it did look like the windows update page. I decided to download the patches as I'd heard that IE is prone to problems with rogue diallers (and I didnt want to be caught out
) . Next time, I'll look a lot more closely at the alerts flashed up by zone alarm!
If/when I get this problem fixed, I'm going to use a firefox browser!
Cheers