Enough people do "reinstall Windows" to make the cautions from the article worth noting in that context; but I've worn out the hardware on 2 machines running Win3.11, 2 running Win95, 3 running Win98SE in the past 20 years, and still have 1 Win95, 1 Win98SE, 1 Win2K, and 2 WinXP running and have NEVER had to "reinstall Windows."

A new machine, or a change in OS, would definitely expose you to the problem cited. Most OEM sources will try to update the preinstalled OS to include recent patches, but definitely may not be up to the latest threats. New OS packages purchased from retail sources sometimes are really far behind.

A new machine, or one with a new or reinstalled OS, should NEVER be connected to any network before AV is up, but many AntiVirus programs "off the shelf" are really obsolete. The usual instructions are to go to the AV maker's site to get it current. With the threat level cited, you may not have time to make it current before being infected.

The threat cited is one of the reasons that the new WinXP SR2 now being delivered will default to turn on the firewall that's built into XP. It also changes the boot to "block all ports" during boot, prior to the time that full firewall and AV programs can be loaded and be effective. On existing machines, there's usually a period of up to a minute or two during boot before the AV and firewall programs can load, and incidents of infection during this period have been found. For the reasons given in the article, everyone running WinXP should ask for the CD version of SR2 when it's available, since reinstalling WinXP would otherwise require downloading all the patches it includes - which can run up to 800 MB. On my POTS connection, that would be about 60 hours of "exposure" - on a good day - before I could "get patched."

John