Eight weeks after Microsoft's first announcement concerning RPC vulnerabilities, MIT still has over 900 network drops disabled due to infected machines on the campus. http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N39/39SoBig2.39n.html MIT is known for having very bright people. Imagine the difficulty people without an MIT education are having trying to fix their Microsoft computers. MIT is taking the conservative approach. MIT Network Security requires users to reformat their hard drive and re-install their operating system (and I assume install all the patches) before re-enabling the network connection. Could you find your original operating system disks? Did your computer even come with a disc copy of the original operating system? I had some computers which asked the user to "backup" the original operating system on 50-90 floppy disks because the vendor only shipped the OS "pre-installed." Very few people spent the time (or the discs). And you are still face with the problem the patches aren't available yet on physical media (CD, Floppy, etc). So you need to find a friend with a fixed computer to make copies of the patches for you.