and my system drive is always ready for it-nuke and pave. delete the partition, make a new one, format it and reinstall windows. no more virus and if you keep all your important files on the d drive like i do you lose nothing. I see linux is becoming more mainstream for the masses and is coming up in discussions such as this. Good. My last Windoze virus / malware was in 2006 and it was my last straw with M$ as well, as I switched 100% to slackware linux and have never looked back. Rick you might want to try ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE.. it takes 15 minutes to restore the image, and around the same time to create a backup.. ditched antivirus for quite some time and never had to worry about it. Install windows, all your programs and configurations and make a backup. A 45GB hard disk endede up as a 20GB image stored on my external drive. Its simple as that.. regards, alexter ;) @TheFu: I know you know your stuff and I suppose you mean well, but often times it's not the OS that's the problem, and at other times, the user and the OS are simply a mismatch. As for the water being fine, as you put it, it was never fine for me, not for long. Sooner or later, a distro would show the loose bolts and chips in its paintjob, making me very glad that I tried out some of the distros, because