Looking For Good freeware Anti-virus/anti-Sptware

[Kafzeil]

So Monday night I'm wiki-walking and I happen across a link to LiveJournal. Well, it looks my Firewall couldn't block the bastard, and I got infected. While my current anti-virus software got a few of them, I fear it may not have been enough, though.

So, any suggestions on some freeware soft of this kind? Thank you in advance.

[VAE]

Good AV was ClamAV and a good firewall was methinks ZoneAlarm

[Keleth]

I tend to use AVAST! antivirus. For a firewall, I'm terrible and don't actually use any aside from the built in one in my ISP's custom modem.
I used to use AVG quite a bit back in the day, It worked quite well.

There's a free online scan at TrendMicro that is quite thorough and tends to get things some of the other ones miss.

[RobbieThe1st]

ZoneAlarm free firewall is good as a firewall... but last I used it, it only worked with 32-bit Windows.
If you need 64-bit, go for KOMODO's free firewall. It seems to do the same basic job, and works on 64-bit windows as well.

Avast! seems to do fine as a free AV; I've never had any trouble with it.

[Tapewolf]

Good AV was ClamAV and a good firewall was methinks ZoneAlarm

ClamAV has its good points, but last I heard it doesn't have a resident scanner, and they tend to be a bit behind the curve in terms of threat detection.

Personally, I would suggest Microsoft Security Essentials.  It's actually very good at what it does.  When I got hit by a drive-by attack, it was one of the only two antivirus engines which actually recognised the infection at the time.

[hapless]

Yeah, Security Essentials is quite nice.
On the front of free-antiviruses, there are:
Avast (was very leaky at some point, supposedly got better),
Avira  (relatively lighter on system load; extremely picky, catches most of the real malware, but triggers a ton of false positives too;),
AVG (heard good things, but it slows down the system a lot)
and FortiClient, which's... weird. Detects good, and is only free one I know that works on Windows Server editions, anyway. It has an integrated firewall, that for some reason defaults to letting things through, tho.
As we shifted to firewalls, Vista's and following ones Advanced Security is quite good, its only downside being lack of "ask user" mode.  It's either allow all, and block specific things, or block all, then check logs and unlock specific things when your programs complain. Someone once pointed out to me that there's a third-party module that provides it, by monitoring the blocked things log and popping up a question if you want add this entry to white list, but I don't know the details.
Comodo's firewall module is very good, but both the antivirus and "Defense+" do more harm than good. Also, for XP you'd need to look for v3.1 on download sites.
In any case, don't use ZoneAlarm. It's prone to messing up with the system, and doesn't block everything it should.

And to not take my words on face value... check out http://av-comparatives.org/ .

[Madd the Sane]

Spybot: Search and Destroy is a good malware preventer and scanner. It looks for Trojans, keyloggers, dialers, tracking cookies. It can also immunize your system against some attacks.

[Reese Tora]

If you're worried about what may still be on your computer, I would suggest finding something that can be run at start up from a disk or flash drive- or boot independently from same, to scan for anything remaining.  The more insidious stuff will hide itself from AV or even make your AV stop working, and you need to run a scan before the virus processes can start.

[Tapewolf]

I would hope that he has fixed the problem by now, since it was almost a month ago...

[Reese Tora]

whups, sorry

I just saw that it was posted in recently, I didn't think to check the vintage of the OP.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Yup, we realise it's real easy to do that sort of thing as the second poster. We'd like it if you checked and realised, and held your post, but we're not going to jump on you with both boots for that. ;-]

[Tapewolf]

Indeed, it was Madd who should have known better.

[Kafzeil]

Yeah, I know I'm late to a status report, but I replaced my old AV with Security Essentials. I think I got them now.

You've all been very helpful, Thank you.