Thanks Dan. I appreciate the response and completely agree with it.
To close this thread, I ended up wiping the disk and installed Ubuntu 8.10. I figure, if a virus/trojan/whatever is found, I'll have to wipe it anyways. If I don't, then this behavior is just not acceptable for the reasons already pointed out. So this gave me a chance to try out Ubuntu and I am impressed with it's "snappiness." (Hope they add an easy GUI control for dual monitor support.) I've added iptables rules to help ensure the proper DNS server is being queried.
I've downloaded and am checking out Zimbra Desktop for linux (mainly because I need alerts and am too lazy to configure free/busy, calendar, etc. in Evolution). Zimbra Desktop still syncing the mailbox but it's syncing much, much faster than the Windows version. yay!
