Virus/firewall question [View all]

[Orrex]

First of all, anyone who recommends getting a Mac or Linux wants to make sweet, sweet love to Newt Gingrich all night long.

Anway...
Running Vista on a Compaq & using Firefox, mostly without incident. Seem to have contracted a virus, however, so I'll need to do some scrubbing when I get home from work. A few questions:

I'm using SpyBot. Does this offer active protection, or is it only on-demand scanning? I feel foolish for not knowing this & should obviously have checked previously, but here we are.

If SpyBot doesn't have an active protective function, can you recommend a good one?

The virus alert came up when I got numerous "permission" requests to access user accounts, all of which I refused. However, when I tried to reboot, Windows Defender popped up with some kind of "Vista 2012 update" firewall warning. I don't believe that I've downloaded anything for 2012 yet, so I became suspicious.

Any thoughts, bearing in mind my earlier comment about Newt?


Thanks!