Moments later, the user reported that their Windows Media Player was hijacked (in not so few words). Stupid typical replacement of the media player .exe. The time stamp on the compromised file matched when a "free wallpaper" site was being viewed, not about.com. So, maybe the winupdt.exe bug did not come from about.com.

But who cares, I told the user to check out en.wikipedia.org (thanks Bitt). No banner ads or popups there. Have to try and support the honest trustworthy sites...... until they take over every dimension of the digital world like Google has/is. ::sigh:: /me goes to check his 9 GMail accounts