Something's Chewing on My Internet Connection

The lady informs me that it looks like we won't be able to comment on the blogs we usually visit. We might be able to comment on a few. Something has happened to our internet connection.

It is slow to begin with. A dial-up connection that averages 26.4 kbps. For the past few days, it is taking forever to load a page (the "Blogs I'm Following" with all your updates took 15 minutes to load yesterday, and even then, it didn't load completely). The connection speed is the same as always and the speed of 'send' and 'receive' bytes looks no different than usual (although we sure seem to be "sending" a lot more bytes...millions more). Today, things loaded a bit faster, but when I try to visit your blogs, all the pages are loading very, very slowly. Then, at the bottom of the comments box on some of your blogs, it doesn't say "posting as Mr. Black" anymore. It has a drop-down box and asks me who I want to comment as, and it doesn't even list me! One of the choices is "Google Account", but when I choose that, it doesn't post my comment, it just reloads the page with a blank comment form!

The lady has "cleared the cache" and logged out and logged back in. Refreshed pages. Nothing seems to be working. She was able to comment over at Tristan and Crikey's page, but at both Mishkat's and Dash Mouth's pages (both have the blog format with the comment box at the bottom of the comments), the above problem happens. The lady didn't try any other blogs because everything is taking so long to load.

Now, the lady hopes this doesn't have anything to do with Photoshop Elements. She knows that Adobe has its software "phone home" to (ostensibly) check for updates (and I guess, to make sure you have legal copies of their software), but for a week after installing it, she did not notice any decrease in internet speed (and she was looking for it because she knew that Adobe would use Photoshop Elements to 'call their server'). The lady has up to date (updated daily) virus protection and ran a scan the other day. Some 'grayware' (not quite malware, I guess) was found. Something called addynamix (AdDynamix) was on her computer (I guess it follows her around to see what websites she visits). She deleted it, but has since found out (via some research) that it can insinuate itself into your hard drive, so even if you 'delete' it, it is still there, following you around the internet and, I assume, using some of your internet connection to send information to whoever it sends info to. This is probably not even noticed on a high-speed connection, but on a very slow one like ours, it makes doing anything on the web excruciatingly slow. If this addynamix is the culprit, she is stuck with it (at least for a while). This nice, new Dell laptop that she is using belongs to an organization that she does some desktop publishing for. She doesn't want to start messing around with it to try and get rid of something on the hard drive. This organization is 2 hours away and I guess she'll have to make a trip in the near future to see if their computer guy can make sure this addynamix is not the thing causing problems (and where it might be hiding on her hard drive). Her computer works fine and at the same speed as it always did. It is just the internet connection that has slowed down to a crawl. It does not appear to be the ISP, as the connection speed is the same as always.

She is giving Adobe the benefit of the doubt that this is not some third-party 'spyware' that Photoshop Elements loaded onto her computer. She has temporarily 'uninstalled' Elements to see if the internet speed is improved. It improved slightly. She is going to reinstall and see what happens.

Anyway, she did delete her browsing history and cookies and maybe that is why she is having the problems with blogs not recognizing me (Mr. Black!). She is not sure why clearing the cache, logging off Blogger and signing in again won't fix that. She didn't see anything in 'known issues' for Blogger.

Well, hopefully she'll be able to fix this. Even though we have rambled on in this post, we really just wanted our blogging friends to know why we are not commenting on their blogs. We miss visiting our friends!!

We'll see if we can do posting. At least that is something.

Thanks for listening, and if anyone has any advice to offer, it would be appreciated!