Folks, this morning I "cleaned" a friend's Windows XP machine that had slowly crumbled into chaos. When I manually removed a crippling virus from this machine 6 months ago I told the technically incompetent owner to NEVER install any software unless she is ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that it's needed, and I warned her to look for sneaky options to include toolbars and other "offers".
So I find Zone Alarm running and popping up pleading to buy it, there are two toolbars, some registry cleaner, Google updaters, Java updaters, IncrediGames, kitten wallpapers and weird startup items in the registry pointing to missing files. I clean all this up and find that AVG will not uninstall because of missing files (probably deleted by a virus), so I have to download and install AVG 10 again (120MB!!) and then uninstall it. I install Security Essentials and it finds and deletes two infections during its first quick scan. So I'm quite impressed by that. The UI is unobtrusive and it shows nothing in procexp or autoruns, which makes me happy and suspicious at the same time: how can such a powerful tool not appear in processes or startups? I believe it's something to do with a "filter manager" because I had to install KB914882 on my wife's machine before Security Essentials would install (hmmm... see HERE <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914882> ). Perhaps this is a case of how the OS manufacturer's inside knowledge is advantageous. Greg
