Nevermind    I did a reboot and everything is fine so it *was* just me. Not really sure what happened but I did have a subset of my processes shutdown for no apparent reason. Not totally sure which ones they were but I was running with only 14 including task manager and browser but without firewall and real time virus, so I was apparently missing 2.

Right now I only have 17 including taskmgr, browser, firewall and virus. It looks like I'm missing one of the three svchost processes that run under SYSTEM.   

I guess you still have some work to do until you've finished fixing your new computer.

No doubt. Although it did just seem to be a single boot that had an issue. I did figure out that the "extra" svchost was from having paint open to paste the screenshot, so 17 total, 16 without taskmgr is where I am now. What service was dropped on the one boot that caused a problem or why the service was dropped in the first place is unknown.

That's what ends up taking so long with these kinds of things. It's not making the changes, it's in figuring out whether or not the changes you made went perhaps a little too far. Thank goodness for my Norton Ghost Boot Floppy. I take numerable boot images and once something goes wrong I can reliably get back to a known configuration. The problem is if you go too fast making these changes before thoroughly checking them out you may leave "timebombs" that may need to be unraveled thus trashing many save points and causing you to redo stuff you've already done. There's some parts of this that I've already done 4 times because of this.

I know that this is Monk-like OCD behavior, but c'est la vie.

I admit I also use the forums "just for fun," but if these ads stay, well, I'll be unhappy about them if they don't end up driving me away.

I just noticed this as well. By no means would they drive me away, but they are a bit annoying. I can't imagine they'd be a significant source of income. Is anyone really that naive to click on advertising anyway?

I'm sure I'm committing some forum faux pas, but when I saw the ADVERTS appearing at the bottom of the OP in every thread

Which site are you viewing the forum through?

Which site are you viewing the forum through?

Need a Spock-mode smily for "Fascinating"

I always start from galciv2.com. I use Opera. I just took a screencap of the OP here w/ ad in view, in case you want me to email it. If Opera's the culprit here somehow, this could push me to trying FireFox...

T-Man has been summoned about the ads appearing.

I was about to post a derogatory statement in another thread towards the OP, because the way they show up it looks like the OP created it.

That was my first impulse as well, but by chance both work and play have had me wearing my tattered tester's hat lately, so I poked around several random threads and saw the same thing everywhere. Comptuer code is so much fun, innit then...

The ads seem to be gone for the moment.

that thread with the word "constitution" in the title

Certainly "billable" hours come before pleasure. However, I would like your contribution from a political science point of view as well as an editor. Of course your contribution as a potential metaverse player is desired as well.

The difficulty I'm having is trying to get some folks to cut to the chase and not be distracted by superfluous issues. In this context what I mean by superfluous are things like procedural checks and balances and to some extent the idea that a constitution is necessary at all.

In this case I’m actually trying to get something accomplished and I’m finding that the words more often than not simply get in the way. I really don’t want to get involved in semantics, if we end up debating semantics we may as well not even bother. I want common sense to rule. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, “The problem with common sense is that it’s not entirely all that common”.

Anyway, if and when you can get caught up in those threads I think I could use your help.

What ads? I've never seen ads on galciv2.com.

There were for a few hours at least. The ad's were at the bottom of each OP. These ads had something to do with google. Some ads were for internet adoption "charities". Most were standard fare. These were viewable as I said for at least a few hours through forums.galciv2.com but are not present at the moment.

Is there anyway this could be related to someones ISP? Because between seeing these ads and not seeing them I had to power cycle my DSL modem. Once I did the ads were gone. For a moment I couldn't connect to anywhere which is why I power cycled my modem. BTW my ISP is Verizon DSL.

I just sent my screen cap to gc2bugs@stardock.com. It was "everywhere" for me, but Mumble correctly notes that none of us are likely able to use that word precisely in this context. I don't know how many different threads I checked for the ads, but it was certainly not much more than a dozen.

p.s. I'd love to hear a brief report on what this was and/or how Stardock fixed it.

I kind of wonder myself if a hacker or something was able to create them. Strange coincidence that they dissappeared right as people started commenting about them.

When I asked T-Man about it he said that they may have mistakenly leaked into the GC2 codebase when they were added on Wincustomize just recently, so if they're gone I assume he figured it out and fixed it.

Here's another possible new one: why can I only see 10 threads when I click View all recent posts? Earlier today, I saw more, maybe twice as many. If the change is intended, it seems like a downgrade to me.

Edit: OK, I tried about 4 times before this post, so naturally things looked "normal" the next time I viewed recent posts. Darnit, I shoulda screen capped...

Here's another possible new one: why can I only see 10 threads when I click View all recent posts? Earlier today, I saw more, maybe twice as many. If the change is intended, it seems like a downgrade to me.

Strange things do come and go on this site. I attribute it to the old "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" syndrome at work.

However, it does make it difficult to validate that my new PC, with it's stripped down OS and tweaked services, is operating properly.