***"Matt McCormack, a security researcher at Microsoft and gamer, posits the theory that part of the reason for the high incidents of infection might be that gamers avoid running anti-virus software out of concerns it might impair the performance of their machines."***

What?

"Might impair the performance...."

I have yet to see a PC with AV installed that *doesn't" perform like a geriatric slug. Whenever someone complains about their PC being slow I have found that uninstalling AV is the action that results in the single biggest speed boost, way ahead of installing more memory, defragging the HD or cleaning the registry.

Wear a rubber when you're downloading a crack kids!

USB thumb drives/flash drive can indeed autorun and be infected from a computer they are plugged into. For example Trojan.Autorun.US can autorun from a USB drive and Kavo and Win32/NSAnti.H can infect a USB drive from a computer. There are many more. Perhaps trawl a few malware removal sites.

Come on.. for the little media coverage that my favourite MMORPG gets, at least get it's name correct!

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Trojans don't "spread". If something can replicate itself, it is a virus - not a Trojan.

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Could be a worm.

To be fair - a trojan can also be a virus or a worm. All a trojan is, is a program that does something malicious whilst pretending to be benign... the behaviour itself may be more akin to that normally associated with viruses or worms.

Security is often strongest at the perimeter so you get someone to open the door for you and then spread inside the system, that's why you have trojans launching worms.

Norton and McAfee are bloatware that slow the PC down. I agree as I've had both installed on XP and Vista Ultimate. Someone suggests NOD32, but apparently that's a bag of bollox too. So which AV are you supposed to use?

I don't fancy going back to the MS-DOS days of just running an AV scan once a week with no real time protection.

Which dynamically loads and unloads the scanning components as needed

I agree, I have Avast running on an old 1.5ghz p4 (xp), a newer 2.4ghz amd (xp), an amd dual core vista prem (it came with the frame!), and a Windows Home Server and in each case, the before and after were negligible. Now my old piii... that's a different story. That thing couldn't run xp all that well, so has been my ubuntu play box and may actually become an xbmc if I get off my lazy rear. (Incidently, for the penguin fans, even Ubuntu became bloated on that machine with 7.1 had to downgrade back to 7.04 as 7.04 lasted A LOT longer on the battery, didn't tax the machine much and actually worked better overall. Yes, even linux has feature creep.