Mr Sillah, The Ethan.x virus (has a few variations) is a Visual Basic macro virus. It spreads inside your PC by attaching itself to the global Normal.dot document used by all Microsoft Word documents. When you open up other Word docs, it copies itself to them since opening any Word document also opens up the Normal.dot template which is already impregnated. From the look of it, the virus just pops up a message box at the second of every month or so, warning about Y2K. In the code I saw (variation D), there no harm done to your PC, except for the annoying messages. It also bloats up your documents. A good virus checker will get rid of it. Otherwise you can delete your infected Word docs, uninstall Microsoft Office, and reinstall, making sure you explicitly delete the Normal.dot document (the uninstaller will probably not delete it). As a general warning about macro viruses (most of them out there are now macro viruses, because they're so easy to write and copy), if Word fires up a message box saying that the document you're opening contains macros and asks if you want to disable the macro, choose disable. You can then go inside the Visual Basic editor (Alt-F11) and look at the code and maybe copy it to a text file and send it to someone who can figure out what it's trying to do. Best of all, get some virus protection software and make sure to update it frequently--the vendors probably post updates to their sites every couple of weeks or so. HTH, Cherno Jagne Halifax. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------