Like Bee I went for years without an anti-virus program or firewall, and had very little trouble--about 3 instances of malware in 4 years, which were removed after locating information on Google. But I did disable some Internet option when surfing dodgy sites (I think it might have been activeX) which meant I was prompted whenever a site tried to download anything onto my computer. The reason I didn't use the anti-virus software was that, when I installed it, it slowed down my computer.

I got a new (well, second-hand) computer a few months ago (which isn't very fast) and installed some freebee programs that came with it: AVG, Sygate firewall, Spamfighter and Spybot. AVG still seems to slow down my computer, for example wants to run checks on every word doc and spreadsheet, and probably HTML file, as well as the email (which is protected by Spamfighter) so I'm thinking of disabling as much as possible and just running it intermittently, along with Spybot.

Don