Let me see if I get this right. You have two networks separated by a router/firewall. Your computer is on one and your husband's is on the other and you see your computer trying to connect to the firewall once in 13 minutes. Does this sound right? Are we talking about two different issues here - one, somebody is trying to connect to your outside firewall and the other one is your computer connecting to your husband's? J.D.
There is one network, my husband and I (along with another computer) are all on it. He sees my computer trying to connect to his (he runs a personal firewall on his computer) once every 13 min. I think there is 2 issues going on. One where my computer is trying to connect to his, and one where someone outside the network is trying to connect to me after I log onto IRC.
I see. It is hard to say what is going on without looking at the traffic, but, in general, Windows machines will talk to each other once in a while. For example, when two or more machine are on a network, every 15 minutes or so some of them will exchange lists of servers they know of. The time seems to be close to what you are seeing, so chances are that this is what's going on in your case. What firewall are you running (the personal one)? Do you see this IP address trying to connect to your firewall only when you trying to connect to the IRC server? J.D.
Yes, the IP address trying to connect to my firewall only happens after i have logged on to the IRC server.
If you know somebody who can monitor your traffic for you, ask them to do this. They would be able to tell you if there's any extra traffic (i.e. if somebody is trying to control your machine). Some malware works as an IRC client and communicates with an IRC server waiting for commands. Here's a very good (but very technical and lengthy) article describing what IRC bots can do - http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm. By no means I'm saying this is what you have, but the only way to say for sure, besides the obvious - AV, is to monitor your traffic. J.D.