Oh yes i had experienced a similar problem my self with a relatives laptop, turned out to be a bad tool bar that had disabled everything in IE, one i cleared un-needed tool bars and was sure everything that needed to be on was on everything was fine :D Good call JMH
@ floss, i would still recommend adding Spy-bot and use it regular, id never liked virgin anti-virus on my sisters pc, she was the same as you stating that she also never had problems until one day her pc became attacked, not wanting to re-install windows i cleaned it up best i could, fortunately this gave me more in site to the way it worked, after several hours of inspection i saw heavy ram and cpu usage, seamed to be more processes running for virgin a.v than actually needed, if i remember correct there were 7 in total, upon further investigation virgin anti-virus would scan every time a program was stopped or started, also the package seemed to be bulked out with uslees stuff and installed into several unessential locations around the hard-drive making the AV put more strain on her system
if you wish for a more secure and reliable anti-virus then may i suggest Avast!
I my self run only 5 programs for security, 1. spybot search and destroy, 2. adaware, 3. Avast, 4. Windows firewall as standard with windows, 5. Firefox with adblock plus.
with all that said it is a very rare occasion i get viruses and mall-ware, what i do get 99% of it come from bad downloads from non reputable sources
