Virus on my Hotmail!

This MAY not be a virus. I agree that Windows Live is rather less than helpful! Spammers can easily 'spoof' the address they are sending from and do so frequently. The most common thing is for their software to put the same address in the From: field as in the To: field so that spam looks as though it was sent from you to yourself! It is fairly easy, though, to see where it really came from if you know how to read the FULL header of an email. The other possibility is that a spammer may have, effectively, got hold of your contact addresses by receiving one of those mails that many of us forward innocently. If you (or one of your friends) has done this, the chances are that it has been forwarded MANY times and has collected over 100 email addresses in its travels. Few people ever think to remove the old email addresses and then they put all of their contacts in the To: box and send it. Eventually, most of these things will end up with an 'email harvester' who simply extracts all the addresses and either uses them to spam you and your friends or may sell CDs full of addresses to a spammer. There is a method of forwarding mail to multiple addresses so that each person receiving it sees only your address and theirs. The trouble is that most people are not aware of how to do it and, in any case, are too lazy to take the little extra trouble. As a result your address and millions of others are eventually harvested by spammers. You say that you have 'run virus scans'. If you are using a reputable and regularly updated AV product (AVG, Avast, Avira are all free and reputable), then you can be about 98% certain that it's not a trojan on your PC which is doing it. You should also install a firewall (Window's own firewall is only half effective) such as Zonealarm Free. This would prevent your machine from sending out data without your knowledge (supposing that you had an undetected trojan or spyware program that was doing this). It is also worth using Spybot Search & Destroy and Adaware. These will tell you about many things that aren't covered by AV programs because they are not viruses as such.