This virus infected my machine through a java based program that was designed to create word trees. Why would I want I program to build word tress I hear you cry?  I'm doing a degree in English language.  When I ran the program, Firefox started asking me to unblock it and another virus started infecting my files like a storm of grasshoppers through a field of wheat.

My virus killer alerted me to the fact that I had a virus and asked me what to do; I had checked the file for viruses before running it, I'm not a complete idiot.

The question I pose is; are virus killers reliable anymore?

If someone was to connect to the internet without any form of protection, they really would be asking for trouble.  There seems to be more and more websites that have viruses in pictures, java scripts that run when you access their site and other programs as well.  The virus killer seems to work well when it's checking a file that isn't part of some sort of installation program, but for some reason, doesn't do anything when it's inside the installation program.

So I install a program and the example I will use is a file called adobe, which was about 600K.  The program install and just disappeared.  It turned out that this program opened some of my port to the net and allowed the creator of the program to install and run about a dozen viruses.  The next thing I know is that my website is classed as dangerous by Google and if I hadn't made an enquirer to my web host, it would have stayed that way for a long time.

 Why are the producers of virus killers not actively trying to create a program that doesn't just check files but also intercept them when they try to run.  Admittedly, this would slow down the process of using newly downloaded programs, but surely that has to be less of a hassle than re-installing windows and running a virus killer for ten hours and then re-installing all the programs that no longer work.