Freware Anti-virus?

If you don't mind shelling out 30$ USD, dl NOD32. In an independent testing a few years back, it smoked every other anti-v. It stopped 90% percent of all viruses thrown at it, I believe, whereas AVG and Avast were somewhere in the 70% percent range and Norton was barely above 50%. I have even tested it myself by going to sites I knew were virus ridden, and Norton gave me no warnings(this was before I  was going to reformat anyway, if your wondering why I was guinea pigging), then I put nod back on and it stopped tons at the very same sites. As far as uninstalling Norton goes, I had to physically delete it from the windows registry, because the uninstall utility kept erroring about halfway through. The absolute best way though, is to use firefox, because 99.99999999999% percent of all viri are written to exploit IE. I have conducted similar IE/firefox tests,  I'd find a site that NOD would stop intrusions (thats how much I trust it), then I would load up firefox and go to the same site, and NOD would give me no warnings. And finally, as far as firewall goes, use blackice. Really though, if you have XP SP2 or later and a decent router which should have a good hardware firewall with NAT(network address translation) and port forward capabilities, and the ability to drop all internet originated traffic(so if you don't initiate the communication it wont let data thru.), an 3rd party software firewall is over the top. Really nice routers, like ADTRAN or Cisco stuff actually inspect each packet and check it for known attacks.