Why do I charge people that I know personally though have nothing but an acquintance relationship with less than people I get to know as customers first? I'll have to take care of that and set the record straight starting january 2006. That way I hope to redefine the interaction with said family as strictly business. I don't talk, meet or hear them anyway, unless one of their computers is acting up. Suits me fine to just do business with them then.
The main machine had problems with "oledlg.dll" reporting it as corrupt/bad, whatever. First question that pops in my mind is "How did they manage to replace a windows system file with an incorrect/illegal file?" because that is something tricky, even if one knows how to proceed. And believe me, they don't know!
Fixed that (sfc /scannow), installed latest versions of Ad-aware and scanned the machine, then ran Spybot S&D for good measure, defragged the drive and extended their subscription for the virusscanner - which had expired somewhere in June! Installed one more XP patch and then I moved onto the secondary PC, used by one of the sons. Apparently since the last time I had been there, he decided to install windows XP onto it. Not my problem, earlier on it was windows Me and that was way too often my problem.
He just had some tiny problems with pop-up and getting disconnected. 3 hours later I had gotten rid of 78 virus infected files, over 300 instances of spy and adware and installed 17 XP patches that had been downloaded to the machine but never were installed. Go figure. I dropped SP2 onto the old box as well (128MB ram, yikes) for good measure hoping it will slow down the amount of trojans and virusses he always manages to gather on his machine. A new and up-to-date virusscanner as a cherry on top of the cake should keep everything under control for the time being.
Time wasted : 6 hours.
Time charged : 3.5 hours
This has to stop, next time she pays the going rate, no more discounts. It's not as if she returns any favors, so why would I cut her any slack?