Ed, and others, your make a good point, hackers can and do get into your computer and actually can take control of it's programs. As a bare minimum you should have a good firewall installed to keep them out. One of the best there is, and it's free for the basic model, is Zone Alarm from Zone Labs. Download it, configure it and no more worries. To get an idea of how vulnerable your computer is, go to
http://grc.com and look around for his 'shields up' and 'probe my ports' articles and test your system. Do it again after you install Zone Alarm, big difference. No, I don't work for nor represent either one, I'm just security concious, the internet is a dangerous place.