Mohd Ali tuned in today for the live calls, and just so happened to catch me discussing anti-virus / anti-spyware software:

Hello Chris. Since the topic inside the chat was about anti-virus, I would like to share some things with you that you might be interested in. I think that anti-virus these days is essentially useless. In the “old days”, they used to repair floppies and take care of viruses. However, now they slow down the entire system, and show flashy graphics. As you said, you can avoid 99% of viruses and spyware if you are more careful as to what websites you surf, and what you download. But in case you DO get infected by a malware, here’s a rather simple way to remove it.

You will only need one program. Unlocker assistant, it is located here: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ – easy! What this program allows you to do is that it frees the binary resources being used up by a process. Since viruses are always running inside the background as a separate process, you need this application in order to get rid of it.

Once you have the program installed, check the run key inside your registry. Both inside the LOCAL_MACHINE and LOCAL_USER parent keys. The viruses add themselves inside those keys in order to start upon booting. So simply locate the key the virus has added. You can google the executable names to separate the malicious start up programs from legitimate ones. The key actually gives you the path to the malicious binary.

Simply unlock the binary by right clicking it, and clicking unlock from the context menu. Then you can delete the virus. Then simply delete the registry keys the virus has added. This only takes a few minutes, but it at least allows you to keep your computer running without anti-viruses eating up hundreds upon hundreds megabytes of RAM.

I’m not sure Mohd has nailed the terminology or nuances of these digital nasties, but his tool discovery seems like it could come in handy for those of you who find yourselves fighting desktop crap on a regular basis. You’re going to need several tools to keep you clean from spyware, etc. Best one, according to geeks in the trenches, is SuperAntiSpyware.