I use NIS (current updates) and Win 7. I happened to check the history log in NIS (which I had not done in sometime.) I was surprised to see that about 6-7 weeks ago, there started to appear an unusual number of firewall activities. There are a large number of instances (sometimes 3-4 per minute) of programs "preparing to access the Internet." While many of these are Windows system programs, there are other programs as well, including Notepad, MS Paint, Adobe Reader, dllhost, taskhost, rundll, Intel utilities, even my audio and video utilities, USB card reader, etc. None of these used to appear in the history log. Now every time I launch Notepad, MS Paint, Adobe Reader, my scanner tools, even CCleaner, etc. it creates a firewall entry about "an instance of (program x) is preparing to access the Internet." And even more Windows system files are doing the same thing on their own.
At the same time that started in early February, I have also been getting frequent UDP entries (Default Block UPnP Discovery). I was never getting these before. I had always had UPnP disabled in my browser, and I have always had UPnP service disabled in Windows services.
So I have no idea what has been causing these two phenomena the last 6-7 weeks. Full scans with NIS and MBAM are negative. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks.