In response to your AntiVirus (AV) recommendation question: I personally used to use McAfee VirusScan v6 before later versions became too 'AOL friendly' and reduced the product to a pile of poop whose only purpose was to steer mis-information at the PC user in the hopes of scaring them into constantly responding to dialogs claiming that their hardware was under 'attack' and implying McAfee AV was 'defending' them.

Symantec's Norton AntiVirus also has the same behaviour from what I have seen on other people's machine setup, along with experience of the product's early versions (year: 2004~) showing easy ways to alter malware and have Norton fail to detect it. It also had issues in detecting non-binary content as malware (such as copying SDBot's (an IRC based trojan) version information in notepad and saving the sample text file and watching Norton immediately lock the machine stating a 'virus' was found).

With most AV products now-a-days focus on being ultra friendly, to the point of being silly, I have found that Kaspersky Lab's 'Kaspersky Anti-Virus' ('KAV') product has been pretty impressive. I have only experience with v5 and more recently v6 but so far so good. I recommend it if you're an intermediate PC user and don't need to be excited when a basic PC events occur.