I can see nothing wrong in your hijackthis log, very clean.

Only thing is one of the programs you have trying to get updates.

ZoneAlarm was out of favour for a time because THEY put in such a feature.

Try using another firewall and see if that solves it. Another good free one is outpost, links on my website below.

Thanks ChrisLG, I forgot to mention the REAL problem. WinPatrol and SpywareGuard are detecting some program trying to change my Internet Explorer start page. I'm unable to detect the culprit.

Cheers, phillim

This is a shot in the dark.

Is it trying to change it to a 'yellow pages' website.

(for those others reading it is not a valid good site, in UK we have a Good site with that name)

Provide a note here of what it is trying to change too,
(BUT type it with extra spaces to stop it being clickable please as in www . google . com)

Thanks again ChrisRLG. The message via WinPatrol reads, " A change has been detected in Internet Explorer Start Page. Your new page is http:// www. msn. com/  If this is ok, then click &Yes or press Enter, Click No or press Esc and we'll restore your page to http: // www. my. yahoo. com/ "

Cheers, phillim

Then it is not trying to change to a malware site, but a MSN one. I would assume that you might have an email account with them or use the msn messenger, It is probably one of those that is trying to change it.

Try accepting the change, and then changing it back to what you want, that might satisfy the MSN program, and remove the prompts.

The other thing is to check each of those MS programs to see if a setting in them is trying to set the home page.

Either way, this is not malware, unless you count windows itself as being malware - now there is a question.