(Vanity) Computer Help (a desperation 3 pointer!)

1) If nothing of value is stored, reformat the drive, reinstall the OS. Problem solved.

Quite true. If you have nothing but the OS, that will work. However, if you're wanting a better computer experience in the future, you should upgrade to either a Mac or at least to Windows 7. Either one - especially the former - will give you less grief than older versions of Windows. And for completeness, Linux also has its virtues. Free is a hard price to beat, and doesn't require any hardware you don't already have. If (big if) you are willing and able to learn it, and make it work on your computer yourself.

2) Buying a Mac won't help you. You're downloading crap from God-knows-where without checking into it. That'll destroy any OS you're running.

Windows users either shut out the evidence and believe that, or they suffer cognitive dissonance. But in reality, the vulnerability of your computer to exploits is a variable. It depends on how alert to the threat of exploits the designer of the operating system was when he/she devised it. Unfortunately Windows was based on DOS, and DOS was designed on the assumption that your computer would be strictly personal, with no path to the outside world and thus no ability for outsiders to send maliciously designed software to your computer.
By the time Steve Jobs launched Apple's original Mac in 1984 he knew about, and desired to use, Unix. Unix was designed for computers with more than one user, rather than for strictly personal computers, so the designer was not nearly as naive about the possibility that you as a user could be adversely affected by what someone else did, or tried to do, on the computer. Multiuser operating systems had to consider how rotten the user's experience would be if there were ten users, and every user was affected whenever any one of them caused a problem on the system requiring a system reboot. You can see that a system with ten users which could be crashed as often by any one of them as the single user of a Windows PC crashed his system, the result would have been useless and the system would have been a failure.
Unix, however, was already a success by 1984, so you know that it was already far more resistant to perturbations than Windows ever was (at least before Windows 7). But there was a fly in the ointment, and that was the fact that the computers that Unix was designed for were bigger/more expensive than the personal (i.e., somewhat affordable) computers which could be built with 1984 technology. So when Steve Jobs brought out the Apple Mac in 1984 he settled for a less sophisticated and less burdensome single user operating system. Even that had a better track record than the PC on the virus issue. But, it was credibly argued, hackers may have been targeting PCs more than Macs simply because there were so many more PCs to target.
Having lost his position at Apple after the launch of the original Mac, Steve Jobs attempted to design, produce, and in 1988 to sell, a computer which was like a Mac but was based on Unix. The computer which he brought out (and which he called NeXT) was classed as a "workstation," code for a PC which was too expensive for the home market, and it was not a financial success. The Linux kernel, originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds (per Wikipedia), was a kind of a port of Unix (but not recognized as truly being Unix by purists) to the Intel-based personal computer.
By the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, personal computers were being built with far bigger hard drive capacity, far more RAM, and far faster CPUs than had been practical for PCs even as late as 1988. By 2002, Apple began selling Macs with OS X, which is firmly based on Unix, even more so than Linux was. Indeed, version 10.5 (code-named "Leopard") and 10.6 of the Mac OS are certified, actual Unix.
Since 2006, Macs have had the same hardware architecture as PCs and been able to run Windows natively. That is, there is no argument that the hardware of the Mac is inferior to the PC; indeed Apple notably does not compete at the cheapest level of the computer market.

3) Antivirus software is free (download AVG from download.com). Only a fool pays for his AV software.

The best-known free "antivirus" software for the Mac is actually malicious software designed to exploit the fears of the user.

5) Don't download a hundred different spyware/malware pieces of software. Default Vista/Win7 settings coupled with a good free AV package like AVG or Avira is plenty of security. Any of those packages you download will automatically update, so the whiners upthread about keeping them up-to-date don't know what they're talking about.

6) Don't discard message boxes. Read them. If you're unclear as to what they mean, Google search exactly what it says--you're not the first person to encounter this issue, trust me.

7) A poor craftsman blames his tools. You don't know what you're doing with it, and you blame the tool for your lack of knowledge. Educate yourself on your tool. You'd have to do this with a Mac as well, so you may as well save the money.

In short, the advice of Future Snake Eater is to be Future Snake Eater. And not all of us are. We want to believe that it is possible to use a computer - even on the internet, which we understand contains not only the ridiculous and the sublime, but also the malicious - without having to be paranoid. Indeed, some of us have the experience of having been paranoid, and having our paranoia used against us.
So when we hear that we are at least as well off running a Mac without AVG as we would be running a Windows PC with AVG, we are ready to listen. The pace of malware development which subverted the Windows system has not happened to the Unix world. You can count the malware programs which are targeted at all successfully against the Mac can be counted on the fingers of your hands, and Apple has taken action within the OS itself to make them even less successful. We'd rather just count on Apple software updates and the robustness of Unix to keep us out of trouble, than to try to outguess people who have more access to our computers than we ever wanted them to have.

Windows users either shut out the evidence and believe that, or they suffer cognitive dissonance. But in reality, the vulnerability of your computer to exploits is a variable.

True only to a point. The most secure system on Earth is useless if the user just downloads garbage willy-nilly without any effort taken to verify what it is he/she is downloading. The user is ALWAYS the weak link in the chain. Vista and Win7 throw up multiple messages telling the user "This program is trying to run, it needs admin permissions to do it--are you SURE you want it to do this?" The uninformed user just clicks "yes" to every prompt and screws up the system. No OS on the planet can save that system.

In short, the advice of Future Snake Eater is to be Future Snake Eater.

Yes, especially considering I don't have these issues. It's not like I became some kind of guru overnight. I learned about my tools, saw what worked, figured out what error messages were and how to solve them. It's cheaper that way, and far easier via prevention to keep your system running optimally while avoiding the pitfalls found by novices.

The user is ALWAYS the weak link in the chain . . . The uninformed user just clicks "yes" to every prompt and screws up the system. No OS on the planet can save that system.

Perfectly true . . . which leads me to the next question, "How do I get a system which is relatively secure (which is all I can actually get) but which doesn't cry 'Wolf!' so much that I end up ignoring the warning which actually is important?"
My solution to that is a Mac, running as a standard user to minimize my ability to shoot myself in the foot. And knowing that "antivirus" claims can be a scam malware vector, I ignore claims that I will blow up my system if I don't get antivirus software. I'm trusting the vendor of my system to take system responsibility. So far that hasn't been a bad bet.
Your mileage may vary.