> I turned on my computer and got a message saying a file was infected with a trojan horse. tech support told me that i was hacked and that I need to format the hard drive and reinstall windows. Stupid cable modem!!! I had a firewall installed, shoudn't that have kept people from getting in?

Not necessarily. Certainly a firewall is your first line of defense against intruders, but it can only keep people from being able to connect to your machine from the Internet without your computer having initiated the connection.(oversimplification, I know, but that's the gist of it.) This can keep you from being 'ahcked' from the outside, but there are other ways one can damage/break into a computer.

A trojan horse, however, is something that you generally have to download and execute yourself, albeit unwittingly. The reason that its called this is because it is usually disguised as a game or other 'useful' program (or more recently, as an attachment to an email, even from someone that you know, i.e. ILOVEYOU virus) A good, up-to-date virus checker that scans any file you download is the best protection against these. If you have a virus checker, run it (from a read-only bootable floppy, if you can), and it should detect and clean the trojan without you having to do a nuke and repave on your system. (I have no idea why your ISP would say that you need to do that; perhaps if you gave more details about what clued you in to the fact that you had a trojan on the system...) Anyway, hope this helps...

--Seo"Worked in Tech Support, so I like to think I know what I'm talking about :)"man