Sorry to hear about your virus issue. But trust me when I say that this is far from being the nastiest virus. The nastiest virus is the one that infects your motherboard bios, and turns your system into a paper weight untill you replace the motherboard. At least you are able to re-format and re-install.
Might I also offer some advice? Get yourself some imaging software. You could have had this fixed in no time. I use my AV for scanning files I download from the net, and thats it. If I get a virus, I restore to a clean/stable image, instead of rely on an AV for that. I create images all the time, and worse case scenerio, I may lose a day or two of work by having to install an image.
Douglas