I've just installed Avast as free as a home user. I've not used it before although I installed it on my Parents' machine a while ago.
I've been using Panda AntiVirus with Zone Alarm free Firewall & Microsoft AntiSpyware. I use Spyware Blaster & run AdAware SE and Spybot S&D daily. Weekly I use more than one of the free online virus testers.
This is an XP Pro system with only the Admin account setup because of problems with privileges otherwise.
I started noticing somethings just didn't seem to be running as fast as they did and tiny discrepancies in how they ran. I removed Panda and reinstalled it and that didn't help so I removed it and installed Avast instead. I did run the Avast online check as well as three others first and they all found nothing.
When I installed Avast, I was horrified when it said that it found 2 worms and 4 examples each of 2 different virus. I didn't take down their names unfortunately. I have seen the info on false positives from Panda and from memory some of those files seem to correlate but some certainly don't.
Today, an ISP tech gave me a link to McAfee Stinger, which is a special removal tool. I ran it and it found W32/Sdbot.worm
The fact that trojans / worms have been found is a real concern to me although I'm only on a dial up account. I'm intending to get a new DVD burner this coming week (only got a CD burner and my files are getting too large) and do a complete backup and reinstall but I'd like to do a slipstream of XP Pro, SP2 and Updates first as I was hit last time I did a reinstall whilst I was downloading the updates. That took about 6 hours of swearing to fix and I don't relish that again.
Any other suggestions?
Regards,
Brian