I'm sorry. The virus attack that originated my windows box took me by surprise. It seems that every time I have better reasons to switch pernamently to the Debian Linux installed in my system.
I would like to thank everybody who responded with the alert, and those who helped me with the wav -> mp3 matter. To those interested in the virus details, the link to some info and removal instructions on "happy99" is http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/happy99.worm.html Best regards, sasha.