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That is what it is all about, learning and to do that mostly you have to make mistakes to truly learn ;D

All the tools for cleaning are great but what you should be trying for is prevention and a back-up and recovery strategy if the dark brown stuff hits the fan, much less painful all round. This topic is also quite long so I don’t recall if these points have been mentioned:

  1. Run applications that connect to the internet under DropMyRights to limit the potential for infection. You might also consider proactive protection, in order to place files in the system folders and create registry entries you need permission. Prevention is much better and theoretically easier than cure.

Whilst browsing or collecting email, etc. if you get infected then the malware by default inherits the same permissions that you have for your user account. So if the user account has administrator rights, the malware has administrator rights and can reap havoc. With limited rights the malware can’t put files in the system folders, create registry entries, etc. This greatly reduces the potential harm that can be done by an undetected or first day virus, etc.

Browsing the Web and Reading E-mail Safely as an Administrator. This obviously applies to those NT based OSes that have administrator settings, winNT, win2k, winXP. Check Bob’s, setup instructions and importantly the dropmyrights.msi file needed as MS have now cleared the original link. http://mysharedfiles.no-ip.org/dropmyrights

  1. A long time ago I purchased some hard disk imaging software and every now and then I got the later versions to work with my updated OS, etc. This software takes an exact copy of your Partitions or Hard Disk and saves the ‘image’ to another location, which could be a second HDD or DVD or to an external storage device. I do this bak-up image weekly as part of my system maintenance.

If you have a serious problem and this would certainly come under that heading (or a crash resulting serious corruption, etc.), then you restore the last back-up image and your problem is resolved. This type of software has hauled my a** out of the fire many times (not virus issues) as to more than compensate from what I paid for the software and I can be up and running in a little over 15 minutes.