Unexplained beep

[Guest]

While watching TV last night, I heard a single beep emit from my Dell
Dimension 8400 (received 1/5/05). The computer and the monitor were both on,
but nothing was running in Task Manager. No error message was displayed.
Thirty or so minutes later, I heard it again. I'm connected to the internet
via a cable modem
and wired router, but I have McAfee Security Center running - including the
McAfee Firewall. However, I was not running IE 6.

I checked under Control Panel and Sounds and found that the "beep" sounded
very similar to - Windows XP Information Bar sound.

What could this be? Firewall blocking an unsolicited access?

 

[Guest]

Are you having any keyboard errors?

 

[Admiral Q]

Did you review the "event" logs - access can be obtained via the
Administrator Tools in control panel.

--
Star Fleet Admiral Q @ your service!
"Google is your Friend!"
www.google.com

***********************************************

 

[Gordon Fecyk]

While watching TV last night, I heard a single beep emit from my Dell

Dimension 8400 (received 1/5/05). The computer and the monitor were both on,
but nothing was running in Task Manager. No error message was displayed.
Thirty or so minutes later, I heard it again. I'm connected to the internet
via a cable modem
and wired router, but I have McAfee Security Center running - including the
McAfee Firewall. However, I was not running IE 6.

I checked under Control Panel and Sounds and found that the "beep" sounded
very similar to - Windows XP Information Bar sound.

wicked.

I've had this happen during a spyware experiment I had someone do for me.
Their test machine got so infested with garbage, that the XP SP2 Information
Bar would appear on the XP task bar.

It seems toolbars in the task bar can be web pages, or at least put together
with HTML, and they run as part of Internet Explorer. This would include
invoking the Information Bar on XP SP2 if they tried anything odd, like
running an ActiveX control.

My first guess is something's running IE or IE-like process in the
background, and is running smack into XP SP2's protections.

Getting rid of it would mean getting rid of whatever it came with, and then
running some anti-spyware to clean out the remaining bits.