plus, there are a couple other things which help to stay safe....


there is a free anti-virus program that does quite well..
AVG anti-virus

and there is much more safety in browsers like Firefox .....it is not only safer than IE, it actually has features that IE hasn't dreamed of...

also, for a better WWW experience in general, many people swear by Proxomitron, which does so many things it's hard to explain...basically, it is a filter--it looks at everything your browser goes to and decides, based on YOUR choice of rules, what to allow or show....

finally, for ever MORE protection, there is SSM...SystemSafetyMonitor which watches what your computer tries to do from the inside-- for example, one of the nasty programs DOES get past the other stuff, SSM warns you when something you didn't plan tries to launch or run...

it all sounds overwhelming, but once you get it all set up, you don't have to do much more than click a preference now & then. Until someone figures out how to find and stop the nastys at the source, we all MUST learn certain tricks...like locking our front doors, or puting anti-theft gadgets in our car. You just can't trust to luck.