I'm being robbed

My grandmother has just recently had a pretty nasty run-in with some kinda adware nightmare. It hijacked the XP, changing permissions to disallow the user to do anything - run programs, edit registry, open task manager - and removed all the links from the start menu, replacing the few that remained with ones to its own scam software.

It was quite impressive, to what lengths someone wanted to go in order to emulate some 'adware removing software' and scam people into paying for it (as in 'pay us and we'll get this shit off of your pc').

It replaced the desktop background (screen settings were disabled), added itself to startup (msconfig broken, no way of installing anytthing else) and removed all drives form the my computer screen. Luckily I had an ancient version of total commender 16bit there somewhere, which didn't give a damn about most of the secuirity restrictions. I managed to run it through notepad's open file dialog. Files backed up, new XP installed, grandma an happy old lady again. All because she was using IE.

In other words, XP's security settings were used all-out against the user, adware and popups covered the screen and in an hour the system was fubar. If all your important data can be backed up in 5mins then you can probably do just fine without antivirus software. Otherwise better use firefox or some lag-inducing antyvir.