Well I don’t know what caused to problem in the first place, but the ‘puter is back online. These days loading up WinXP on to a cleanly formatted hard drive is just the very beginning of the process and was the easy part. The next step is locking down the system from external nasties, before I connect to the net.

This is really important, since the out of the box WinXP installation is full of well exploited security exploits. The Internet Storm Center tracks the average time before an unpatched system is exploited by the white noise of port scanning and exploit hunting viruses. It is currently tracking at about 23 minutes.
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