New
#1
I hate false positives
Malware is bad, but false positives are almost as bad, in my experience.
I know no single antimalware is perfect, and free programs aren't near the quality of pay programs, and you often have to run 2 or more to find everything. MSE is.... well, it's free and part of Window sand while it offers live protection and is okay at catching a lot of bad stuff, I've had a few false positives with it, generally jpeg files and it only happens on occasion. I think it's an instance of the new definitions set having a bug that flags an image file the second it's created on the hard drive. It's happened... maybe 3 times for me and I know the files were safe otherwise.
I haven't had a malware infection for months. I was clean as of March, at the very least. I run MSE, Malwarebytes and SAS, with TDSSkiller on hand. I run a scan once a week and, at most, I find the same few tracking cookies. Between Adblock Plus, NoScript and Spybot's immunizations, I'm dodging the stuff the infects through browsers.
This morning I was playing freeware game Gungirl 2 on my secondary Dell XP computer, and on exiting the game I get a popup that says "stdst.exe has stopped working". A program not quitting right on exit isn't a big deal in itself, I've gotten somewhat used to it for certain games, especially freeware titles... Google that up and find lots of mentions of malware. So I have to run scans on both PCs and files on the Dell were taken off the Gateway.
EXCEPT I'm not infected as it seems stdst.exe is also a legit part of Multimedia Fusion and games made with it tend to have that internal program name- which likely explains why the program's icon in the notice box was that of the game. So I spent 15 minutes freaking out over nothing, apparently.