OK. I have (again) restored my PC back to only original programs. Everything that was on the HD was destroyed. Norton 2003 is included with the recovery software in addition to LiveUpdate.
My PC is a PowerSpec (
www.microcenter.com), and is probably pretty outdated by now. I have a set of Recovery DC's that can recover origional componets or "Nuke and Pave" the entire HD... I chose the latter. After recovery, I set up all user accounts and settings. Installed MS OfficeXP and its componets. Transfered all my saved files to where they were before restore. Downloaded Firefox (note that at this point my PC has not yet been connected to the net), and then poped in my ISP disc. Verison with MSN. At this point I connected to the net and set up everything with MSN.
Now I'm left with a fairly clean machine (I hope)... What do you recommend I do now? What is a good AV/spyware software that I can run regularly? And can someone tell my why SP2 is so bad? I hear stories but no details. Thanks for the help. Yes I am a noob.
Edit: My internet just died again, but after restart everything has been running very fast (the way I'm used to) so I'm hoping that whatever is wrong has been eliminated by Norton. It did remove something after start up.