Originally Posted by irseg

Well I'm a believer now. I just hadn't looked at sufficiently shady sites.

I went to astalavista.com and then to a bunch of serial/crack search engines from there. Didn't download a thing, clicked no to all the activex installers, etc.

Soon various installers started popping up more and more rapidly. I managed to get most of them closed and then saw some advertisement had taken over active desktop. Shortly thereafter an error message popped up indicating a modem could not be found (a freaking dialer installed itself!!), then a runtime error, then my computer crapped out.

After rebooting, I waited 10 minutes before again rebooting into safe mode. When it came back up 3 more activex installer prompts popped up, I had 10+ porn site icons on my desktop, and it locked up hard. I must say I was quite surprised!