Is there such a thing as an Internet connection log?

Everytime I am away from my computer for any length of time ( a few hours to a few days) when I return - it has logged itself onto the interent and different folders are open on my desktop...Programs/Common or some misc. text file from my desktop. Is there a way to see which program requested the connection to be established? I have SBC Yahoo's included Norton antivirus/spyware running and it says that I am bug free. Please help....it's freaking me out a bit....like I'm being watched!

Couple of things you can do.

First,, you can install a personnel firewall (Comodo is an example that is free). It will only allow connections to the internet which you explicitly allow. If anything else attempts to connect, it will be logged.

Next, you can install a packet sniffer (I use Wireshark). This is a bit more complicated since you would have to be fairly familiar with TCP/IP traffic. You can't really hurt anything using this, you just might not understand what you are looking at.

Although your AV is not picking anything up, I would recommend running a rootkit detector as it sounds like someone might be controlling your desktop remotely.

Hope this helps.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer and look at the logs to see if you can narrow down what is causing you to automatically log on.

Also check Control Panel, Scheduled Tasks to see if anything is indicated there as well.

Finally go to Control Panel, Power Options and confirm that you are set up to actually turn off the computer. It could be actually going into a hibernation or sleep mode then restarting when a scheduled task comes due.

yea...kinda....cookies, cache, history. And also people can put keyloggers, trojans, and session capturers on your computer easily.