First, understand how your anti-virus product works. Then, start with a known-clean computer and follow specific steps to assure good virus detection/protection. Do research on specific products before purchase.

Once damage is done to files on your computer (no matter what the cause) it's often too late. A comprehensive backup strategy is a vital component in your computer security arsenal (and don't forget to test the restore routines!).

The Windows Scripting Host is used by few but makes many avenues of mischief available to malicious software. Consider removing or deactivating it.

There is currently a big push toward relying heavily on recognizing "bad" file extensions and acting solely on this knowledge. That's not necessarily a good thing as extensions can be misleading.

Integrity products record information about your system for later comparison in order to detect changes. Just detecting changes is not enough, however; the detection must have some "intelligence" behind it to avoid confusion.

Monitoring for system-level routines that perform destructive acts can help, but such monitoring is fairly easily bypassed. Do not depend on it alone.

There are many sources for virus information; some are even accurate.

This page will hopefully clarify some of the noted confusion about the ability of Outlook and Outlook Express to interact with worms and viruses.

There are some relatively simple things you can do to help protect yourself from viruses and worms (safe hex). Consider those listed on this page.

Scanning looks for known viruses by a signature or characteristics that make new viruses similar to existing viruses. This requires that anti-virus makers and users keep products up to date.