Bizzare windows xp pro behaviour or am I crazy?

I have always been pestered with small glitches is xp pro so today I bought a new hard drive, formatted it and did a clean install. Immediately upon install I (forced to use the evil explorer) downloaded kerio personal firewall. Then I went to microsoft.com and did the updates. Kerio of course let me know as to each site that windows was connecting to….but I got really confused when at one point it attempted to connect, to ftp.citkit.ru …..huh????? No Ruskies for me… I ran… I did check each ip address, and they mostly seemed connected to Redmond until I started seeing iad servers…huh? Iad is spyware! So now spyware gets installed with Win xp pro? Sure, I'll download avg, adaware, spybot and finally hijack this and watch to see what is running. But why the heck would a new format, with a legal disk install of win xp pro lead me to a Russian site? Now I'm wondering, "do I need to reseach about rootkits?" Is win xp pro rife with iad net data collectors, aka spyware? I'm getting so sick of this… I no longer even buy the 24 cd's that I used to by for fear of rootkits…and I've never been a downloader, but now I live in fear of music cd's and am wondering, perhaps I need to fear clean installs of microsoft xp pro?? Am I going crazy. Can someone tell me how, and why a clean format, a clean install shunts me to Russia for update files?

You need to disconnect from your online service while installing Windows. After it has completed installing, go to control panel/Network settings and right click on the addapter you plan to connect with, choose properties and turn ON the firewall. THEN connect and do updates and what have you. Kerio is an excellent firewall (version 2 is free, if you can find it) however, it cant help you untill its installed… same goes with windows firewall. Kerio will get a bit frustrating at times, just make sure to check the box at the bottom of the popup to write a rule for what your allowing/disallowing that way it wont keep poping up.