Dangers with a computer in the wild

What a Tangled Web I Wove (washingtonpost.com)   This is a pretty good article from the washington post about a user's experience trying to get a badly infected computer spyware and virus free. It brings up the good point that most people don't think about putting on firewalls. Given how useful a computer can be as a potential spam/virus relay, it really makes sense to lock things down. I like to use spybot-search and destroy, and zonealarm, both are frewware and extremely usefull. The ZoneAlarm people do okay on upgrades, but I highly recommend donating to spybot to keep them around. The other solution to protect your computer is to move to mac osx or linux for which there are many fewer malicious programs and spyware. Then you can get tons of software for free too (viva open source).