>>>I use AVG and I did a test. I ran the full scan last night before I shutdown the laptop. This morning I booted the laptop, opened IE and went to my Gmail, Yahoo WebMessenger and UT. I then ran a full scan again and it found about 20 malware cookies, etc. Whassup with that? People like us know what we are doing, how does the average Joe keep up with this stuff?
>>
>>You need something that prevents you from getting the stuff in the 1st place - ad-aware has a pro version that does this...
>
>AVG catches things as they come in, but I have it set to be fairly passive as it really creates overhead when I'm developing. I'm very happy with AVG, I just don't understand how the 3 sites I went to could bring this much stuff onto my laptop.

Yeah I know what you mean - it's a tradeoff for performance - have he same issue here.
I read somewhere a coupla weeks ago that if you put an unprotected computer on a broadband connection that now the average amount of time before it's infected with something is down to 7 seconds. Wish I could find the article again - its was pretty interesting.