I had my main computer totally wiped out by a nasty virus yesterday afternoon. I got the virus from a site that I have visited for a year or so, ever since it was posted in a thread here (it's just jokes). I didn't click on an ad, or anything of that nature that I am aware of, and the three anti-virus/anti-spyware programs that I was running missed it almost entirely. One of them noticed it, blocked part of it, but let the rest through. The result of the virus was that the desktop was hijacked, and the TaskManager was shut down as quickly as it opened. The trojan then proceeded to attempt to connect to a series of malware/adware sites, though I had unplugged the cable by that time and just watched the URLs pop up one after the other.

Scanning in Safe Mode using all three programs found a couple things, including what I think was the main trojan, but the fixes all failed. The thing was highly polymorphic, as I could bring up the TaskManager when I logged in as a guest, and could see random processes (they were easy to identify), along with a couple other malignant processes, though destroying any of these didn't fix anything, so I would guess that the main problem wasn't being displayed.

Rather than mess around with it, I copied the few data files that I wanted to save, then restored the system with a disc image to its initial state. Now I'm in the process of restoring everything.

The issue, though, is that I was running three anti-virus/anti-spyware (Spybot, AVG, and the highly regarded PC Doctor), while only going to sites that I had frequented many times in the past (and only a couple of them), which were not in the gray area of the net, and none of that mattered. So what kind of protection will actually work? At this point, I'm contemplating building a computer (I was intending to anyways) for games and programming, but no internet access, then using my current main system as an internet portal with only guest access.

What else?