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As it was said before. A good firewall will keep most of the nasties away. But a wireless network will allow alsorts of computers in range use your internet.
I had this trouble once but turned my modem off and the computer stayed connected to the internet through someone else's system. My wireless now is set for exclusive mac addresses and I don't have any trouble.
At the moment I have installed a program called "logmein" that allows me to access my computer anywhere by logging on through the internet. However if I can use it from the remote I am sure a commited hacker could also get in so there is nothing on my computer that you can't already find on the internet.
The main thing to remember is that if you have your computer on the internet don't put anything on it that you don't want to share with the world. Keep a separate computer for this and transfer any files you need by disk. No matter what you do there are so many holes in Microsoft's operating systems (for their own use) that nothing is 100% secure.
On the subject of slowing of computers. I have a lovely 2.5GH Pentium 4 computer in my garage that I was given by a friend who got another because it had become so slow and no one could fix it. She had children that had ipods, Limewire etc and Norton Anti Virus that got into a loop and 2000 errors in the registry. It took me 6 hours to remove all the garbage and clean it up but now it simply flies as a basic computer on my network and does real processing work for me.
Barry
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