A thought occurs to me that maybe they turned the water off to prevent contamination, not because of it. And now that they're sure the supply won't be contaminated, they turned it back on. Once there is contamination, the pipes would have to be flushed, meaning running your water for at least several hours.

As for your XP woes, the only guarantee of removal of any infection is flatten and rebuild. Your problem with the proxy settings may be a side effect of the infection. Who knows what else is messed up, or still lurking in the background?

I wish I could tell you how you keep getting this particular infection (this is what, the third time?). The only thing I can think of is it's got to be something you're installing that carries this extra stuff. Scanners won't catch everything. I highly recommend that any firefox addons you get, get them ONLY from the mozilla addons website, as those have been vetted to some degree.

I wish I knew more precisely what I do that keeps me from getting this stuff. I think it's more likely what I _don't_ do.

Brian