quicken 08 security vulnerability

so far, i like quicken 08 which i have been using in production mode, if you will, but i haven't really been poking around to play with the new features other than the tags.

but today i was giving my computer a general health check by looking through all the downloaded programs in the "Add or Remove Programs" screen as well as looking through all the folders created under C:\Program Files just to see what stuff is there. i found lots of unfamiliar stuff which could be a sign of bad health.

i knew to expect some unknown entities because yesterday a ton of new stuff was downloaded to my machine when i was trying to get online banking to work. i opened a brand new bank account with a korean bank and signed up for online banking. of course they install a whole slew of things: AhnLab MyFirewall, AhnLab MyKeyDefense, AhnLab SmartUpdate, INISafeWeb 5.0, INISafeWeb 6.0, SignGATE EWS and a bunch of certs and CRLs which together total about 87MB and are presumably required for online banking to work. but, it's still not working. tomorrow when i go to SeonUn's house i will ask her to help me read the error messages which are in korean. anyway, back on track ...

i found an unfamiliar software on my machine called AnswerWorks and didn't know where it came from. while trying to find out what it is and where it came from i learned that it is bundled with Quicken 08 as the help-search utility and that a security vulnerability was recently discovered for which a security patch was released. after opening quicken and playing around with the AnswerWorks to determine whether or not i wanted to just uninstall AnswerWorks and use the other homegrown help system that was included with Quicken or leave AnswerWorks and install the security patch, i decided to install the security patch. so now i've got AnswerWorks Version 5.0 build 8 and no security vulnerability.

the point of my post is that a general spot check and a few minutes of investigating unfamiliar bits and pieces revealed a potential for a security breach. i think i'll run the virus scan again tonight.

now ... on to some other things i want to find out about, like what the vulnerabilities are in having a Flash Plugin 9 and if so what can i do to minimize those vulnerabilities while at the same time have the ability to view trusted flash objects.

UPDATE: so there is a security vulnerability in the Flash Plugin but the solution is downloading the latest version, 9.0.115.0, which i have. now i wonder if it's possible to use firefox to control which flash objects are displayed/played and which are not.