So it appears that while I was away in Europe my brother managed to contract a virus on my computer. He enlisted the help of a friend of his and managed to seemingly get it under control. In actuality though, the virus did much more harm than it first seemed as the virus was capable of harvesting log in credentials from my FTP client and sending them out to other compromised computers which do the actual manipulation of the files on the FTP servers. Normally this wouldn’t be so bad for the average person but since I’m a web developer with access to many many websites this becomes a big problem.
I determined that my machine at home was at least partially to blame when I noticed that both my and Kari’s sites were hacked. I still believe that my machine might be infected as there’s some strangeness going on, mainly some problems in my registry that I’m strangely unable to repair and the fact that Windows Update doesn’t work on my machine. I’ve tried running every scanner I can find and my computer comes up clean even though I know something is wrong. I’ll probably have to reinstall Windows and am currently debating if I should install XP again or make the jump to Windows 7. Upgrading to Windows 7 would be a no brainer if it was actually out and available but sadly, it’s not. I could use the freely available preview release but that will expire March 2010 and would rather not have to reinstall Windows so soon 
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Anyway, I’m sure I’ll think of something…
