I'm happy to see you back so soon. Hope you are liking the new posts we have been writing.

As for your question – Process Explorer is just one (incredible) tool that can help you understand if a process is valid or malware. There are more, which can help you find as well as prevent installation of such stuff on your PC, about which I would writing pretty soon and would ask you to check the upcoming posts.

Since you asked for the signs – There are 3 common signs:
1) When you locate the process – its not really where it should be: The virus/malware would always install these programs in a different location, since Windows does not allow them to overwrite the original service.

2) Its impossible or at least very difficult to end such a process: If a process is valid, it would close down in a jiffy, however, a malware would not let its process close down, no matter how hard you try.

3) There are multiple instances of same process running in the Task manager: Some genuine processes like "Svchost.exe" do run multiple instances. But in Process Explorer you can verify the software/company it belongs to. If you see several processes with similar names without association with any software – thats a sign of trouble.

The email you got was a notification of my reply to your comment. All you need to do in that email is to hit reply and write a response like you are writing an email reply. It would automatically be posted a reply of my latest comment. Hope that clears it up. If you need any assistance, I would be happy to help. Cheers!

PS: It would be easy for you to comment if you sign up with IntenseDebate.com – its the comment system I use on this blog.