What is the best software to find viruses and spyware and then deal with them appropriately? User friendly helps too.

I use Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and AVG free. All of which are free and easy to use. I don't know if they are the best, but they should get you started....

By far the most useful program I have ever used for that is called Process Explorer. I highly recommend it to anybody [who uses Windows].

So how do I use it?

Its a replacement for the task manager. It ha sa lot of additional information about each process, such like child processes, threads, dlls, handles, etc. If you can't figure out anything else beyond that, you should have one of your friends come over to fix your computer instead of trying it yourself.

I use Adaware, and McAfee. You can get the full virsion of McAffee from their website on a trial basis.

Or you can get the full version from IT on a permanent basis:
http://campus.umr.edu/it/software/antivirus/

Hijack This has been a great help to me several times.
It can be complex, but you can easily e-mail the log to a friend who has experience with the program.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html

I knew it was some where I just couldnt remember where and Ive been lazy... Thanks

I also stand behind Hijack This. It's solved several things easily that I wasn't sure how to deal with.

I've worked in menial computer repair for 2 years at Katy Computer (hole-in-the-ground in Valley Park), I agree with all the afformentioned software, I might also suggest CCleaner for routine mantinence and stuff like that, too.

Basically, we ran it before all of the other scans, just to dump all the temp files, and tidy up stuff like that, so the other scans wouldn't go thru tons of temps and take forever. It's got a few nicities all rolled in (msconfig-esque tool, uninstaller), it's worth a try.

Also, we used Security Task Manager, kinda like dash's Process Explorer, it was seperate from windows task manager, so that was kinda nice. Again, just a suggestion.

Good luck!

Live OneCare has a 90 day free trial, and its incredibly low maintenance and doesn't seem to be too process intensive when compared to mcafee/norton. i had used avg free, w/ zonealarm, but right now im trying out OneCare and it works really well. no virus problems etc to date.

great for install and forget.

Hijack This = good stuff.

Killbox is a nice program, it can delete files that cannot be deleted otherwise (not 100%, but much much better than windows).

There's also a program called autoruns, which searches the registry for programs/services that are set to start up when windows does, and can disable/delete those keys.

First of all install McAfee from the UMR website and update it. Then reboot into safe mode with networking, install, update, and scan with both Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D.
http://campus.umr.edu/it/software/antivirus/

After that, if you're still having trouble, use hijackthis to look at your startup files along with a few other things, search google for any questions you might have. Remember that with hijackthis, most of the things you're editing are being removed from the registry, so don't start deleting things without knowing what you're doing.

That should pretty much fix you up, if you're still having problems the best thing to do, is just google it.

Evidently AVG Free isn't free anymore....