Just how vulnerable PC's have become in the internet!!

[Oliver]

I've had terrible problems with malware on XP.  I used:
-NAT firewall router
-XP firewall
-Adaware/Spybot/...
-Norton anirus

I think most of the problems came from my wife's Chinese webmail services.  They would only work with IE, with practically everything enabled.  I was already suspicious of course, but how can you tell your wife not to read her email?

The whole system slowed down to a terrible crawl.  IE would open all sorts of popups, forced homepage, new toolbars, etc.  The malware regenerated annoying programs and files.  I tried every malware remover available, and nothing could deal with the problem (did this repeatedly for more than a month).  In the end, had to reinstall.

I'm using win98 at the moment.  It lacks some usefull features of XP, but it's just not targeted as much.  I also find Opera to work quite well for me.  It's quite rare that I will have to switch to another browser now.  I also convinced my wife to switch to safer email services, but they often don't handle the Chinese encodings properly.

[Oliver]

I also had to install Nortan antivirus in order to connect my PC to my work's LAN at the time.  I agree it's a resource hog, and not all that impressive in performance.

I've used esafe desktop before, with good results.  It stopped problems which nailed every other PC on a LAN (each running other antiviral progs).  I stopped using it when it was no longer free.  That was several years ago.  It worked well to detect unkown mal/viral ware by recognising suspicious program behaviour, rather than comparison to a known list.  In the case I mentioned above, the other antiviral progs missed recognising the new software, as it was not on a list.  I suggested to the sysad of the LAN to use esafe, but he insisted that it's approach didn't work as well as having regular updates of a virus list.  Oh well, he could think about that while fixing all his 'puters.