This past sunday my computer's installation of windows ceased to respond after a restart. Aparently the filesystem (NTFS) had become corrupt so a fresh install was needed.
Do not keep your computer plugged to the internet if you're doing a fresh install of WindowsXP.
After setup had finished my first boot riddled my system with viruses and spyware, and some of my best attempts using AVP, NOD32 and even TrendMicro's Housecall failed to remove all of the infiltrations. So even after patching and the Service Pack 2 install I was stuck with a system that didn't respond to clicks on links in 3 browsers, iExplorer 6, Firefox and Opera.
I used another machine to read what could probably be the cause of my system's instability, and it seems everybody agrees on disagreeing. Some say spyware leaves entries in the Registry even after being deleted, others say Spyware and some Viruses "get pissed off" as ridiculous as that may sound and may actually harm the system permanently when deleted.
The solution as was pointed by a friend who is a systems integrator based on similar and often repeated experience was to download as many drivers as I could as well as patches and the SP2 install, burn that to a cd and wipe the system clean and re-install everything once more without an active internet connection.
3 hours later and I had regained control of my system.
I must have lost 9 hours just trying to figure out what was going on.
As I mentioned on one of my very first few posts, I want to switch to a different platform, that platform will probably be OS X, and install Linux on my AMD machine.
After having lived through this one can only conclude that sticking with windows makes you a target, regardless of how many updates and how current your system is.
Props go to NOD32, seems their antivirus is one of the few out there that is not a resource hog.
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