Ever since Saturday night, I've been irritated with my Sygate Firewall because it always deactivated itself right after startup.

I first repaired, then re-installed Sygate, but to no avail.

So I scoured Google today, which finally led to some results when I figured out that I supposedly had the same process asking to access the internet twice - svchost.exe. One of them turned out to be a Trojan that hid in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\ directory.

I manually deleted it with a lot of savage satisfaction.

Then, after a good deal of preventative registry-cleaning, mainly with CCleaner v2.12.660, I downloaded and ran Malwarebytes' Anti Malware 1.28 which found the corresponding Trojan-infected key in the registry and deleted it. And let's just say, for the record: I'm seriously unimpressed with AntiVir. I've ran it three times since Saturday, and each time it found nothing amiss. Hah.

Boo, hiss!!! So much for my good impression of you, AntiVir!

Also helpful was this article.