Cheers

Using a remote access solution is different, although technically they are still creating some sort of a tunnel for you to securely connect. The difference is, you are not connected as a remote computer on the work network, you are only making a very specific secure connection to a specific port and specific computer. Not the same as a VPN tunnel, where you basically open up all ports and re-route your communications to the work net. What I prefer is a program like GoToMyPC, or my favorite, LogMeIn.com. They act as a third party to “broker” a connection from your home system to the work system. They do this in an outbound-connection only scenario. What I mean by that is, you don’t open ports up on a firewall and re-route traffic to certain internal systems. (another security hole, possibly) In the LogMeIn setup, it makes an outbound connection without any inward firewall rules. You connect at home to LogMeIN, they know where the work computers is, and they create the connections between the two for you. IMHO, more secure that way.

Does that help? I am not familiar with proxynetworks, but it looks like some similar connection methods as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn.

I might add too, that even though you would still create an inward connection with a firewall rule, I would still greatly prefer an SSH tunnel to another internal system. Like creating your SSH connection with a port forward to RDP on your work desktop. (I wrote a program to do that actually!) But since I’ve discovered LogMeIn, I prefer that the most, it’s just way to easy, no servers and firewalls to manage at the work end. But no matter what, unless there is an actual practical requirement for using a VPN (and I can’t think of one that SSH can’t handle, in regards to remote access), I stay far away from VPN’s. That is, unless you desire to connect to remote networks, then sure, VPN sounds great.

However, I did check, you can indeed disable “access to” IE in Windows 7, but that doesn’t remove it from the computer. I went to “Set program access and computer defaults” and unchecked the box that says, “Enable access to this program.” This removed it from my desktop and start menu’s. I then looked in Program Files, it was still in there and I could launch it. So not REALLY removed, but a handy little tool to hide it from clients! I’ll do that and also add the IE icon to Firefox to trick them.

It’s not that Firefox is necessarily more secure, because I can’t give evidence to support that, but I can say, when my clients use that instead of IE, they have way less problems and bugs.

In your situation, your kind of stuck. You have to use sites that require you to use IE. Personally, I dislike IE so much, I just don’t use software that require me to use IE. I am not anti-MS, just anti-IE. :)

Now, another process I have running and using a lot of time is CrashPlanService.exe. That’s my backup program, which I LOVE! and that hasn’t caused me any issues before, for over a year now. I even excluded that program and data files from MSSE in hopes that it wouldn’t conflict. So here’s the thing, I removed MSSE, and guess what? System hum’s along with very little CPU time. Maybe jumps around at 2% to 5%, with tiny bumps to 10 or 15% once in a while. That’s kind of normal, and the system moves along much more quickly. And yes, that’s with my backup program still running.

Anyway, hope you have better luck! I’d rather just not use AV than deal with the slow downs. Of course, I don’t think I’ve ever had a virus. Clean lots for my clients, but I know what *NOT* to do!

For internet explorer, you can possibly press WIN+R and type in regsvr32.dll or something like that, and it will reload the dll file for explorer. This was explained by Ed Bott on how to solve corruption with adobe flash activeX.

As for me, I use Chrome and Internet Explorer. I find Chrome perfect when I want some casual browsing necessary. I find Internet Explorer necessary purely for the various addons and tasks that only internet explorer can accomplish. Some of these include the onenote addon and other productivity ones. I also find it frustrating that Chrome doesn’t give you an easy way to see what addons are being loaded and a quick way to disable them.

As for firefox, I always believe that firefox is kind of in between. It is like Internet Explorer with the speed. It accomplishes neither productivity nor speed perfectly, as having two browsers that are more optimized for such tasks.

Perhaps, your tweak might work because the program is updating itself? If the program is simultaneously updating its definitions and scanning its definitions, it might cause more cpu problems.

So far, there doesn’t seem to be any issue with this tweak. I’ll monitor the progress of the program for several days and conclude whether there is a difference.