For you McAffee virus scan victims, let me recommend the AVG virus scan product that's free for personal use (yay!) and works well too. Add a decent spyware scanner (Spybot S&D is ok), and maybe something that will warn you about unauthorised attempts to access the internet (eg ZoneAlarm).

Of course, you Windoze users _always_ create a non-privileged user account and use it for surfing the web etc. When you want to install something you log in with your privileged account (or use the "run-as" context menu to access the required privilege). WinXP makes this almost painless.

Using a browser other than Internet Exploder (eg Firefox) is wise as most attacks are targetted at IE still (and Firefox is somewhat more secure anyway).

Remember that Microsoft Windows' virus susceptibility is a business worth over a billion dollars a year (ask Symantec) - so perhaps they have little incentive to find a permanent fix.