Hi Paul, I totally agree with you. You could have added: How to explain how many AV-users get infected while having a running anti-virus... How many people get sensitive information lost/stolen because they didn't backup/protect it... AVs are kind of Vs also!

Thanks for all this information, I find it very valuable (and surelly enough others too). Sorry about me being aggravated about antivirus programms, it must be a reaction to all my friends always asking me what antivirus programm do I have installed on my PC, or "Hey, I got a virus, how can I get rid of it?", or "I even got an antivirus programm but still got a virus", "It says it's a worm, what is a worm?", or "Hey, my antivirus told me that YOU sent me a virus!" etc... If only everyone started to spend some time on how not to get so easily infected instead of trying to find the best antivirus...

Interesting thread, thank's for your comments and examples. Question: how did the virus on the installation disk of the program your company bought infect the network ? Was it on a bootable CD? It happens that I download programms from the internet. If I am not sure if it is safe, I google its name to check for its safety. If it comes from well known companies, I do not even think of checking. I also trust the shareware sites as I will never ever be the first person downloading the corrupted piece of programm, or else I'd better play Loto (which I wont anyway). And since the community spreads the knowledge, a virus gets isolated quite quickly. At home, the kids do not (yet) have access to internet and are not allowed to install new software alone. At work, I am one of the only ones running my PC without an antivirus, I guess its a priviledge... (of working in a small company). It happens that collegues (with antivirus installed) get infected, the server too, I must be lucky as I did not get one virus up to now. Nowadays, viruses are mainly collecting email addresses, they do not harm the computer as badly as they used to do in the 90s. Somemore, if a computer gets infected, one can quickly find the proper way of deinfecting it. So I guess it is a compromise. It looks like I prefer to live a bit more dangerously than others (beeing sometimes one or two clicks away from an infection) but without the hassle of keeping my antivirus program up to date and letting it shake my hard disks for hours for nothing 99.9999% of the time and poping up each time I generate a new exe.

Hi Dan, My guess is that without the antivirus interrupting the process, Opera would have prompted you with a popup where you could choose to save or run the downloaded activeX/program or whatever script. This is only one click away from potential infection, but far enough for the advanced user. Some lousy user would just click the "Run" button and take the risk of getting infected. I have never found a page like you describe, I am not saying that such pages do not exist, but probably most of these pages where the antivirus programm gets nervous about are just commercial popups that a normal user closes by clicking the X button or that the browser automatically blocks. Still, I ran a check on my home PC just for the fun of it, and the antivirus software boasted for finding 83 viruses, of which 8 where very dangerous threats. After checking what these threats were, I really lost the rest of the little trust I had in antivirus software : some old registry keys of unistalled commercial/advert game software for the kids and some attachment in spam email that I just deleted, that's it. This is not serious enough. Some people do panic at such wrong advices from an antivirus programm. Antivirus software just exagerate their messages as they want to proof that they are usefull but they are more of a disturbance for a experienced user.

The biggest viruses are the anti-virus programs !!! If you still have an antivirus on your computer, deinstall it quickly before it harms you more !!! Since 1990, I have almost never ran any antivirus program on my PCs, whether at work as a regular employee in several big or small companies or at home (never ever had one at home, where no administrator would force me to install and run one, contrary to some work places). And I can say that I never got caugth by a virus, to the contrary of several people I know, who had anti-virus software installed (for which they paid most of the time), and got infected, because they did not follow some simple rules, thinking they where protected. If you are on this forum reading this post, your are most probably a computer professional, meaning you know what an e-mail attached-document, a firewall or a router is. Keep the following simple rules : - Just dont do anything stupid like double-clicking an e-mail attachment that you do not expect, especially from someone you dont know, or, while using IE, clicking on a link in a strange email pointing to an strange web page. If you use Opera, Firefox or any alternate browser, your are less at risk (but still). - Never start a programm (an exe) you do not trust or do not know the origin. - Never open an MS Office document or PDF you do not know. - Use Foxit reader (x 10 faster) instead of Adobe-Acrobat. - If you can afford it, use Opera instead of IE + Outlook. Opera is a free browser, news reader, e-mail client, news-feeds, etc. that has it all and fast. - If you use Outlook, deactivate the e-mail preview pane (as some virus used to autorun through the outlook-email-preview-pane !). I am not sure this is still necessary, but it was at some point. An alternative is to use Opera mail client or Thunderbird, for example. - Be sure you are behind a firewall (properly configured...). If you are behind a router, the hardware router firewall will do the job (if properly configured...), meaning you can (should!) totally deactivate the windows firewall. - Be sure to enable automatic windows-updates to protect you against future threads. - Disable the Bios boot on floppy disk, CD, DVD and USB drives as this is totally useless nowadays. This is all very easy to do and worked for me for more than 15 years. Keep in mind that even the best antivirus program is not a 100% protection, as it will know nothing about new viruses. An antivirus program may give you some hints / advices / alerts about new threa

Stop beeing paranoid about virus !!! The biggest viruses are the anti-virus programs !!! If you still have one on your computer, deinstall it quickly before it harms you more !!! Since 1990, I have almost never ran any antivirus program on my PCs, whether at work as a regular employee in several big or small companies or at home (never ever had one at home, where no administrator would force me to install and run one, contrary to some work places). And I can say that I never got caugth by a virus, to the contrary of several people I know, who had anti-virus software installed (for which they paid most of the time), and got infected, because they did not follow some simple rules, thinking they where protected. If you are on this forum reading this post, your are most probably a computer professional, meaning you know what an e-mail attach-document, a firewall or a router is. Keep the following simple rules : - Just dont do anything stupid like double-clicking an e-mail attachment that you do not expect, especially from someone you dont know, or, while using IE, clicking on a link in a strange email pointing to an strange web page. If you use Opera, Firefox or any alternate browser, your are less at risk (but still). - Never start a programm (an exe) you do not trust or do not know the origin. - Never open an MS Office document or PDF you do not know. - Use Foxit reader (x 10 faster) instead of Adobe-Acrobat. - If you can afford it, use Opera instead of IE + Outlook. Opera is a free browser, news reader, e-mail client, news-feeds, etc. that has it all and fast. - If you use Outlook, deactivate the e-mail preview pane (as some virus used to autorun through the outlook-email-preview-pane !). I am not sure this is still necessary, but it was at some point. An alternative is to use Opera mail client or Thunderbird, for example. - Be sure you are behind a firewall (properly configured...). If you are behind a router, the hardware router firewall will do the job (if properly configured...), meaning you can (should!) totally deactivate the windows firewall. - Be sure to enable automatic windows-updates to protect you against future threads. - Disable the Bios boot on floppy disk, CD, DVD and USB drives. This is all very easy to do and worked for me for more than 15 years. Keep in mind that even the best antivirus program is not a 100% protection, as it will know nothing about new viruses. An antivirus program may give you some hints / advices / alerts about new threads, but wou