Happened to me a couple of years back. Had to reformat the hard drive and lost lots of vital info. An ounce of prevention was bestowed upon me from a fellow Freeper. Make an image of your hard drive and update occasionally. I use Acronis True Image. If something unfortunate should happen it takes 20 min to get the PC back to where I want it, rather than days reformating and installing all your software again.
One thing I did when I got a virus was do the fresh install on a new drive and slave the old one in. The virus may be still be in there but since I wasn’t booting from that drive, it couldn’t resurrect itself.
Yep.
Especially if you have kids ;)
There’s still some “catching up” on Windoze patches, virus definitions, etc, but the time you save is considerable.