Windows 7: Eset NOD 32v4 or Microsoft Security Essentials

ESET NOD32, hands down, no contest.

I use only NOD32 and have it's Vista 64-bit version working great on Windows RC-1. It detected and removed viruses just fine when I was scanning a co-worker's drive via USB to remove viruses for them (I do PC work on the side apart from my full time job as a software engineer).

You don't need the suite from ESET, just the basic NOD32 package, a browser less prone to attacks like Firefox or Opera, and some good browser add-ons for whitelisting sites to allow JavaScript.

The "detection in the wild" and scanning throughput of NOD32 beats all others, no exceptions. It also has the smallest footprint of any of the big name Anti-virus packages out there.

(picture of idle resources)

...like IE is good enough. I am trying to use most of MS programs tho, for compatibility reasons... i mean is MS programs cant work together, then what will!?

Internet Explorer has been subjected to many security vulnerabilities and concerns: Much of the spyware, adware, and computer viruses across the Internet are made possible by exploitable bugs and flaws in the security architecture of Internet Explorer, sometimes requiring nothing more than viewing of a malicious web page in order to install themselves. This is known as a "drive-by install". There are also attempts to trick the user into installing malicious software by misrepresenting the software's true purpose in the description section of an ActiveX security alert.
A number of security flaws affecting IE originated not in the browser itself, but ActiveX-based add-ons used by it. Because the add-ons have the same privilege as IE, the flaws can be as critical as browser flaws. This has led to the ActiveX-based architecture being criticized for being fault-prone. More recently, other experts have maintained that the dangers of ActiveX have been overstated and there are safeguards in place. Other browsers that use NPAPI as their extensibility mechanism are suffering the same problems. In an April 2005 eWeek opinions column, Larry Seltzer stated:

While there has been a striking lack of actual evidence that ActiveX is unsafe, there has been no shortage of baseless assertions and cheap shots against it. My favorite was the "Internet Exploder" incident in which Sun actually paid someone to write a malicious ActiveX control. The test system brought up all the warning dialogs about the program that you usually get and the Sun employee actually had the nerve to keep whacking on the enter key quickly so they would close as quickly as possible and didn't mention that there were any such warnings. Meanwhile, they also didn't mention that a signed Java applet could also perform dangerous privileged operations and would provide similar warnings. Most ActiveX criticism is simply uninformed, but this example was hypocritical and dishonest.[47]

While Internet Explorer in 2008 had a comparable number of security vulnerabilities to Safari and Opera, and significantly fewer than its primary competitor, Mozilla Firefox[citation needed], its comparative ubiquity has resulted in many more affected computers when vulnerabilities are found. According to research done by security research firm Secunia, Microsoft has not responded as quickly as competitors in fixing security holes and making patches available.[48] The firm also reported 366 vulnerabilities in ActiveX controls, an increase from the prior year.