Good Morning,

Yesterday, I decided to fire up the Microsoft Network Monitor to monitor traffic flowing in and out of my system. I choose to run this tool because I've been having persistent issues with web requests timing out and Comcast has been unhelpful in resolving the issue. There is no obvious spyware or malware, I'm running Windows 7 with the latest updates, along with Microsoft Security Essentials. I've run a python program that checks for signs of being rootkited, as well as another program that has checked my registry, my dlls, processes, threads etc and thus far nothing has come up.

I'm not going to say beyond a doubt that my system is clean though because I'm seeing strange traffic through Microsoft Network Monitor. What I'm seeing is IP addresses around the world attempting to connect to my system through UDP ports in the unregistered block (49000-65000ish). I ran the tool most of the day yesterday and probably saw 20-25 of these connections. The IPS most often ended up being on the east coast, and one case one was from Denmark. I installed some expert addons for MNM and ran a search through though content frames and there were no references to IRC. I also haven't noticed any connections for about 14 hours since I started actively monitoring the situation.

IPv4 (86.52.15.224 - 192.168.1.115) ConvID = 139
UDP (44867 - 10958) ConvID = 140

Can any experts provide insight in to this, as well assess what my next steps ought to be?

Thanks.

Edit: Disabled smiles in text