Until February, I was repairing PCs for 5 years (well, since 2005 anyway) for a mom and pop outfit. I've seen a lot during that time and am 100% convinced that no AV/Malware scanner is going to be good enough to protect you. You have to virtualize. I don't worry about viruses anymore. I do have a realtime trojan protector (Threatfire) but really don't depend on it. Occasion I start the free version of Malwarebytes, get it's updates and do an on demand scan, but that's the paranoid side of me. I have no worry since not only do I virtualize the OS that I use to browse online (XP VM running in VirtualBox), but I also run Sandboxie inside my XP VM (so, in essense, I'm double-sandboxed). I do all my edits with Win7 and have set up shares so that I can transfer images between the 2 OSs. I've tested my system at (well at that time that is; they keep changing) known maleware/infected sites and stopped the attack from those sites cold. Trust me; you are not going to beat Virtualization. I keep rudimentary Firewall and (like I said earlier) and simple Anti-trojan program for that type of defense, but my main protection comes from virtualization. I've mentioned this at another forum that I frequent and they said what I was doing is overkill. I don't argue with them anymore; I just don't worry about infected sites for files anymore. I even run suspect programs inside Sandboxie to see if there are issues with those programs (you can install programs inside Sandboxie which is cool; the main system is not even aware of what's going on inside Sandboxie). Trust me. It's really the only way to not get a driveby infection. Now your Sandboxie session can get infected, but just periodically delete your Sandbox and all is well. I do so around once (sometimes twice) a week. Case now closed.

Maybe you noticed a interesting side effect of using sandbox:
that usually allow to completly unistall SW
and so logically to reinstall trial SW after the trial to try again...

tzuk (creator of Sandboxie) frowns on this, but I won't say if I have (or haven't) done this. lol

I am the one everyone comes to with computer issues, and I am embarassed to admit that I don't know what Sandboxie is!

Check their site out PM. It's free for personal use (but tzuk recently implement some license changes that may change this) but you will get nags after a month and loose some cool features too. I've paid for this gem several years ago though and don't worry that my license will ever expire.

http://www.sandboxie.com

Once it's installed and running, do you have to set up each program or is it transparent? Does it effect moving data from one program to another, like using the clipboard?

You need to rightclick on a program and then run it sandboxed. If you double-click on the pizza (I know it's suppose to be a sandbox, but to me, it looks more like a pizza; lol), it will launch IE (or your default browser) sandboxed. The free version doesn't allow you to directly integrate a particular program to be sandboxed (paid version does), but I don't ever (well, only one program have I done so) do this anyway. I just righclick and run sandboxed. It is a program that, the more you use it, the better you understand how it works.

edit:

Also, I just realized that I mispoke on my original post. You don't loose certain features; you just don't have them at all in the free version. Sorry about the misplaced words. One of the main features that you don't get with the free version is multiple sandboxies (I have 3 that I used for various things. 2 of them I use for email (yahoo and att don't get along now that att solely uses yahoo mail, so if you don't have 2 sessions, you can only have either yahoo or att mail open by itself; SBIE circumvents this issue).

Of course i would never do,even i suppose would be a crime hard to proof
..mine was just a academic and maybe pedantic remark

Hy i just try malwarebytes and is really good

He give me a few false positives (i suppose the trojan in the help file of gimpainter a false positive, anyway i want send the file for a better check...) but finally identify and removed a very irritating beast that any other AV was unable to find, and some suspicious modification of registry keys.

but finally killed that damned trojan/hijacker installed by firefox extension a ALTERNATIVE to fireproxy

even unistalled that thing continued hjack Firefox any 2 hours changing always my preference to redirect my traffic trough a russian proxy,and no the Firefox forums no other AV where able to fix

i sort to ibernate the problem (the beast was not resetting the "exception" to the use of his cursed russian proxy...
so as exception i chose "*" and "**" that include basically any side )

but only malwarebytes eliminated the damned thing
(if doesn't pop out again after reboot....)

Yes; Malwarebytes is a pretty good program. I've saved sever PCs with it. It's still not perfect PC. I would definitely go into Safemode with networking and do an online scan (many will still work in safemode). If you had the malware for a significant amount of time, I would back your data and re-install. I had saved many PCs but you can never be 100% sure the gremlin is gone unless you do a re-install. The longer the malware lingers, the more damage it can do. Sorry you got hit. (note: no smiley this time).

i really didn't suspect that a firefox extension could hide a trojan

Now you know why I sandbox all my browsing (religiously so). I still fear that one day, the malware authors is going to be able to take down Sandboxie, but so far they haven't.

If i was a malware author that would be my daydream:
not put down Sandboxie, never and never..long live to sandboxie

instead a nice torrent with a cracked Sandboxie....the full version for free with no time restrition...
....with the best keylogger and spyware included in the core as extra bonus

Thanks this program is awesome. =)
Question though:
If it runs a program in a sandbox, will it detect problems and let you know?

All my web page logins are controlled through two programs on my laptop. One is a password manager and the other is a fingerprint scanner. When I run a webpage in Sandboxie, the fingerprint scanner and password manager don't work. I decided to try and set Sandboxie to force the other two programs to run in the box, but it is only possible in the paid version. I rely on my programs, because my meds cause memory problems and remembering 70+ passwords is a problem.

That's one of the drawbacks of the free version PM; you can't set programs up to be forced to run Sandboxed. You can, however, right-click and run it sandboxed. Understand that, with the free version, you can only have one Sandbox (a limitation; I regulary run 2 sandbox sessions concurrently and sometimes run a third to try a new program out). I do all this in XP by the way. SBIE for 64-bit OSs doesn't protect the OS as well (thanks to Microsoft) but it 100% protects XP systems.

Howdy. Finally got around to activating my account here and read over this thread. I've been maintaining computers and networks since 1997, currently I'm an admin on a WAN that spans from South Carolina to Malaysia.

While I'm not as geeked up as Lyle with his virtually virtual environment I do get my geek on from time to time. I can't believe that CCLeaner was not mentioned on this thread. CCleaner, crap cleaner, is a free utility that gets down and clean up all temp files and folders that the standard stuff misses. Malwarebytes is great for cleaning up infections it is not intended to clean out old registry entries that are no longer needed or temp files.

CCleaner, just load it and follow the bouncing ball.

BTW, I'm Bob, howdy!

I've used CCleaner on and off for several years now. It's pretty cool and can even delete index.dat (which is not possible in native mode normally unless you log on as another user and delete that file). I really don't use it now though, since I Sandbox and cleaning IE junk is as simple as deleting the Sandbox. Other cool programs to consider is JKDefrag (believe they recently renamed it, but too lazy to find out it's new name; I using run it once ever 6 or so months using my Hiren CD). Oh yes; Hiren is a cool CD too; may or may not be legal though (so don't tell anybody that I use it on occasion). lol

Sort of reluctant to share the link for Hiren because of it, but I'll share it's wiki and you can decide. It'ts Geek on steroids and dangerous for the layman, so be aware of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiren%27s_Boot_CD

Hiren and Barts are both in my bag o' tricks. I got barts booting from a USB drive which works out pretty neat when in a pinch.

Didn't realize Hiren was in the 11s (had 10.4 I believe; lol). Again, haven't been repairing PCs (accept for a few neighbors and friends and pro bono at that) since February. Just downloaded it, but probably won't burn a CD with it since I already have 10.4 on CD and I can mount the ISO as CD with Virtual Clonedrive and boot my VM using that. Again, Hiren is not a novice tool. I've repaired many a machine with this gem and can vouch for it's power, but it will make a monster out of those who think they know what they are doing. lol

As a side note, I never used Bart's interface (Hiren allows you to use your own custom tools by the way), but from what people I know who use it, it's a gem too.