For the first time in 20 years of using PCs Ive just managed to infect myself somehow with my first virus. Yay me.  :cry:  W32/Gaelicum.A apparently. Its fubared every single .exe file on my PC, so its format and re-install time. I wasnt even trying to remove it, I was after this W32.Bagz that plonked dl.exe everywhere and messed up my net connection but the AVG free scanner I installed to sort it found Gaelicum instead. PCs been fine for months, and the problems only started when I actually started looking for the stupid things and trying to remove this dl.exe file, which is allegedly related to a completely different virus. Next thing I know all of my .exes are trashed. Fortunately it just infects .exes so backing up important documents is no problem, but Ive learned my lesson. Can anyone recommend a decent, non intrusive and non system hogging (i.e not Norton) virus scanner that is likely to catch these kind of things in the future before they get out of hand?

Avast!   ...or click on the penguin in my sig.

I used Panda Internet Security 2006 on my bench PC which I have found the fastest/most effective scan engine around. Id say go with Antivirus Titanium 2006

I have also used Bullguard and F-Secure, both good but both are fairly slow scanners.

Id say Panda ftw

Cheers
Tongy

NOD32 MUTTS NUTTS

I like NOD 32 as well.

Thanks guys, Ill give these a try; I removed AVG and Bitdefender as they were laggy as hell and causing my PC to freeze on boot. As it happens I didnt need to format, the folks at AVG released a scanner that will disinfect .exe files infected with the nasty that I had, so things are back to normal now.