Have you ever been infected?

Are you kiddin'?!? I got KIDS!

I've got AVG on a couple computers, and Avast on 2. These do a good job catching most crap these kids run into on their stupid Japanese anime romance sites and this one game site that they would not stay away from. (They don't dare pull that stuff on this box!)

From time to time they get something that completely trashes the system. This is mostly because they leave everything open and running while they shuffle upstairs, in slow motion, to tell me: "Dad, the computer is having issues". That was Virtumonde. A nasty little bugger that one. Self replicating.

I regularly do a system image on those boxes. So I tell em "it's trashed. You f'd up. Turn it off, it's done!" Then I wait a day or 2, restore the image, and we are good to go.

I exaggerate. This happened a couple times a while back when their brains were still squishy and evolving. They are pretty good about everything now.

That reminds me... haven't imaged the basement box in over a month!

Never! --> Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and I hope to keep it that way. I do realize, however, that search results could land me on a site serving up drive-by downloads. I am hopeful that won't happen though.

Not really. I use AVG, Malwarebytes, and Super Anti-Spyware. The only thing they catch is cookies and some random, relatively harmless spyware.

Never had a trojan before.

Like many others I've been infected mostly in my early days of computing. When I was much more naive. I was still using IE. Pop-ups galore. Kazaa and so forth infected my system that I had to reinstall. Of course this led me to discover FF and all the anti-spyware apps like spybot, adaware, etc. Then I went to a tech school and learned even more and I haven't had any major issue with viruses or malware since 04-05 maybe. My family on the other hand is a different story. Just recently my parents PC got one of those fake anti-virus bugs. That one was a pain to kill. I had to down load a process killer to launch Malwarebytes or Trend micro. Even in safemode I couldn't launch any apps to clean. After killing the process I was able to clean it up and that's when I locked down there computer and put myself with an Admin account and theirs on a limited user account. So far so good. Plus I didn't run noscript on FF on theirs, but it's on their now.

I really do not understand why some people run into malware so many times I have never ran into malware in my entire computing experience. I have confirmed it by running many many manual scanning programs and have never found anything.

All you have to do is use your common sense and 90 percent of programs will never appear...