Unless you never connect your PC to a network (and since you are reading this, you do), anti-virus protection and removal is a constant concern. Using a combination of different tools periodically can give significantly better coverage than choosing a single tool.
While trying to clean up a particularly troublesome worm I was referred to AVGFree from Grisoft. Grisoft sells a swath of protection software for viruses, spam, malware, and spyware, but they also give away a very effective anti virus package called AVGFree. This free version comes without some of the bells and whistles of their commercial products, but as far as I can tell, the virus detection and cleaning is complete. They have some use restrictions (see the website), but nothing that would affect the average home PC user.
The software will self-update and self-scan based on time of day if you set it up that way, or allow manual control through a simple panel. It will also scan incoming and outgoing emails. Updates come out every day or two, download quickly, and usually don't require a reboot. I have been running it regularaly for about a month without any problems and it seems to happily coexist with Symantec AV and Spybot.
Just today, Grisoft had a press release announcing that they had
"earned Checkmark certification from West Coast Labs on Windows Vista Business
Edition"
so they will probably be around for a while. Whatever - it's Free!
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