Our list of Frequently Asked Questions has grown too long to be easily read in this format. To make it easier to find the questions and answers you're looking for, we've split them into the following categories:

1. What is the difference between a virus, a worm, and a Trojan horse; and how are they sent?

2. I recently got a virus. Norton found it but refused to correct or get rid of it. I just used McAfee to clean the system. Now my computer is slow.

3. I had McAfee 4 and upgraded to McAfee 6 and it doesn't work. They sent back 4 pages of things to do to fix it?

4. Comment, please, on Norton vs. McAfee

5. Is it better to uninstall my old anti-virus program and then install the new version?

6. When I boot up after installing Norton Antivirus, I get these messages: Cannot find CTL3d.DLL. Windows needs this file to run c:\oplimit\ocraware.exe

7. Neat trick (supposedly) Put a phony email address in the front of your address book and if an email virus gets into your machine, the bad address is tried first and won’t go further.

1. Viruses attach to various programs and do damage or cause Windows to misbehave. Worms destroy or delete files. Trojan horses are programs that do things like format your hard drive. The end result is usually the same: aggravation trying to clear them out and clean up the damage they’ve done.
It used to be that the most common way to spread them was via diskette. But with Microsoft's help, virus's are very common in e-mail now. (Visual Basic Scripts are very common now and Microsoft thought it was a good idea to incorporate this into all Office products)
Don't open unexpected e-mail; be very careful with attachments; and make sure it's something expected and was the icon type of all attachments.

2. When you install anti-virus software, they turn on real time scanning of all files. That is every time you open a file, it scans it. This definitely slows down a system. My advice is to turn off real time scanning, but make sure that you do not turn of e-mail scanning (as that is where most viruses come from these days) and can your computer once a week. Also, make sure you update the virus definition files weekly.

3. Remove all anti-virus software (from add/remove programs in the control panel). Run Scandisk and defrag. Remove all temp files. Re-install McAfee from the v6 CD.

4. I have a preference for Norton as that is the program I have used the most. But both are good programs.

5. Yes, uninstall and then install. I recommend that users purchase a full copy of an anti-virus program, which comes with one year of updates. Then renew that for one year. Then at the end of two years, purchase another full retail copy of the antivirus program. Uninstall the old version and then install the new version.

6. That file is being used by your OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Re-install that application or remove it via Add/Remove programs. If you can’t remove it and you don’t use it, install it and then remove it. That way it can take out the old references to it in the boot up process on your computer.

7. All this does is notify you sooner, sometimes. It does NOT stop the virus from trying the rest of your address book or stop the virus from picking addresses at random. This is a classic hoax. By the time you get that first bounced message back, the virus will have time to send a couple of hundred copies of itself.