I'm using Madame Dufarge's 'puter right now.
I’m running Webroot after the family’s IT software and hardware professionals recommended it. It has knocked out things Malwarebytes did not clean up. It even protects my USMC son, who is incredibly stupid about this matter and has stupid friends who send him stupid things. Before I got Webroot, Mr Marine got some awful thing and Malwarebytes did nothing to clean it up.
They have to track these people down, put ‘em up against a wall, shoot them, and put the images on the internet as a warning—the 21st century equivalent of mounting traitors’ heads on the castle wall.
Bottom line: After putzing around for hours on end, it occurred to me that when I first got the machine five years ago it came loaded with XP Pro, but with an upgrade disk to Vista Bussiness, so I ended up doing a clean restart with Vista. I lost a ton of old, mostly useless data (sixteen years worth of "favorites" for example, a lot of them dead links anyway), and most of the important stuff is on Madame Dufarge's machine anyway.
I have all the discs for the other programs I use and they are all running just fine. My main bitch is that it will take me forever to reload all my music. Good thing I had all that backed to CDs, but still, hundreds of them... Jeeez.
I now have more protection than ever, including Malewarebytes of course.
Again, thanks for all the help. It's just one of the many things that make FR such a great site.
P.S. I'm already starting to really dislike Vista. I'll see how this shakes out after I give it a chance.