Death to Viruses

I have just upgraded my system to XP from ME. My husband has been on at me for years(?) to do it but I have been very comfortable using ME. Why buy a new program when the progam I was using I liked and worked? XP is not cheap to buy but he convinced me and the bank balance took a dive. Tom installed all the firewalls, virus catchers or whatever they are called and he was confident that the computer was protected. We had had problems not too long ago. So on to the net and I got damn pop-ups. That wasn't right they shouldn't be happening. Really darn persistent almost ordering me to click on them as my computer had a viruses and they will deal with it. No way was I going to do that These pop-ups got more insistent and written in capital letters. 'Got to tell Tom', I decided so he could fix those damn pop-ups for good. I finished what I was doing, logged off and closed the computer down. When I saw Tom later I mentioned the damn things to him.
Hours later Tom went on the internet and sometime after that I heard him swearing, oh did he sound angry. Had to find out what was wrong.
Oh no!!! The computer screen was black then it flashed, on and off a message in huge letter your computer is infected click this link. Oh my and was it infected!!!
Tom not meaning to had clicked one of the nasty pop-ups I had told him about and this was the result. For nearly an hour he tried to clear it. No way could it be deleted and we resigned ourselves to the loss of a lot of information etc. But thank goodness Tom back up everything when he scrubbed ME. First thing after re-installation was to get the latest to safeguard the sytem.
These B***** that create virus etc are always one step ahead. I sometimes wonder about the rumors that those that make the anti-virus ware create the virus. Well some of them anyway.
They may be out to get the big business and just consider the home computer just collateral damage but I would love to collaterally damage them.