Been a little bit quiet

Yeah, sorry about that. My return from Italy was to a pretty daunting inbox and a backlog of puzzles to send out – the urgent stuff is out of the way now, although there’s still plenty to do. This wasn’t helped by a (yet another – this is becoming a habit) virus problem, a rather strange piece of malware whose source I’ve never discovered. Avast didn’t pick it up in time to stop it but it seemed to recognise it easily enough once it had wormed its way into my system. The first I knew of it was when I opened Anagram Artist; Avast warned me the programme was infected but offered me the option of using it in ‘sandbox’ mode, rendering it usable and safe… except that wasn’t the case; it just close the software down. So I uninstalled it and did a fresh download. Sorted. Worked fine after that. However…

The malware migrated to Crosswordman! This time I ran a full AV scan that took around 8 hours. Avast found the malware and deleted it. Nice job, except for the fact that in doing so it rendered Crosswordman unusable, so I had to uninstall that and re-download it. A couple of days later and, hey-ho, Avast found the same problem. Thankfully, this time it offered (successfully!) the option of opening Crosswordman normally so I’ve had no problems since. In a way this is probably better than trying again to remove the malware, since that seems to have been a trigger for it to migrate elsewhere. For now at least, it appears to be contained.

So at long last I’m completely back in crossword setting action… and, to tell the truth, feeling just a little bit rusty. But there are puzzles out there ready to tease, with consecutive prize offerings coming up on Saturday, Sunday and Monday – I’ll be more specific once we reach the end of the working week.

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