AVG Antivirus is very good & free to home users http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.phpAlso get an app called Adaware. It's not an antivirus but scans for spyware on your system. Also free.LonelyplanetXO

http://www.free-av.com/ The only one I found that works, is updated on a frequent basis and is a breeze to setup. It saved my neck after others (commercial)failed miserably.

I agree, AVG is a fantastic product, and free!

Another vote for AVG from a satisfied user.

Hi,I'd just like to mention my experiance with AVG, I had used AVG for years, but a couple of months ago I noticed that there was a file in my TEMP directory that was growing, and it could not be deleted.I asked a few people and they said open it and have a look inside it, well this file was logging ALL of my keystrokes, credit card numbers, passwords etc, now AVG was up to date, but it could not find anything.A little worried at this I downloaded the free trial of Norton AV, run the scan and there it was a nice little keylogger virus, Norton cleared it up and so far no problems.So in my case the moral of the story is "you get what you pay for", seriously if you are typing in credit cards numbers and such then I would suggest getting a, for want of a better word, decent virus scanner.Just my experienceDan.

Ok, after all this great feedback, I think I might go for AVG.Thanks for the help, people! :-hah

Reading all the above sent me looking in Windows/Temp to see what might be lurking there(AV scan shows clean) and I found a number of files all called perflib_perfdat-xxx where xxx is a letter/number combination - EG 756 or 7b7 etc.They appear to be .dat filesDoes anyone know what these are? Running WinXP home.Experimentally I moved all of them into a New Folder but when I restarted the PC later a new one appears. Some seem to contain nothing but a few ,when opened with notepad show the following (or variations on this)....... Any info very welcome(EDIT: the Forum removes white space- as shown in notepad this is all spread out over several text lines) gE# C o n t e n t F i l t e r C o n t e n t I n d e x I S A P I S e a r c h M S D T C P e r f D i s k P e r f N e t P e r f O S P e r f P r o c y H H P S c h e d R e m o t e A c c e s s R S V P S p o o l e r

I use Avast http://www.avast.comFree for home use...Scans computer, email (great if you use Outlook or Outlook express since it scans hotmail also!), P2P programs, and Instant Messengers (aim, msn, trillian).

Sounds more like a trojan than a virus. Big difference!! You can't expect a program that detects viruses to also detect other nasties. Even if Norton picked it up, there's likely some other little beggar that Norton misses and an other antivirus program catches. They can't all be 100% effective and none of them, no matter how up-to-date they may be, can detect "new" bugs. First, the bug has to appear; then a fix can be created. That's why they're called "virus".....no different from the bacterium that attack humans/animals.And for the record, I use AVG...have been for years. Adware and Spybot are other defences against unwanted 'junk'. Also employ 'safehex'; do not strictly depend upon any antivirus program.

Those files are used for performance monitorting. Have or are you running Performance Monitor?They look funny because they are in UNICODE which requires 2 bytes for every character.

Hey people,what free virus scanner would you recommend me? I'm not up to paying anything right now. If there is no free one, then never mind I never had one until now and I did not have any problems (which does not mean I neccessarily don't have viruses, I just don't know about 'em and so I am always very relaxxxed hehe) ;-)ThanksEtienne

>I use Avast http://www.avast.comSame here. I started to use the Avast, after I had a big headache with the JS/Fortnight in my comp. BTW my AVG was updated.Regards,Jorge Niny

Thanks Ken- I guessed they might be something to do with that but didn't want to interfere without knowing.Dave