how offen do you guys get a virus and/or worm and/or trojan horse and/or spyware infection?

In the past two years I have never gotten a virus or trojan horse, this is because I have been using a firewall and av. Yes, I know that you can still get them but as long as you dont visit questionable sites and download suspicious programs than you shouldnt get any.

Now as far as spyware/adware goes for about the last two months I get 2-3 s a week and they are just cookies. This is mainly because I use firefox, before I would get 15 or more a week and they would be a lot worse than just cookies.

I've never had a virus, trojan, or worm on any of my two systems (Win98, WinXP Pro), and I've been using Windows-based PC's since September 1998. The only thing ever detected was given the moniker "suspicious," and only F-Prot and BitDefender ever labeled a file as being "suspicious." I have however had a fair share of false positive alerts from virus scanners over the years.

The last spyware infection meaning I didn't know the application installed spyware was in 1999, and came from so-called "free" download managers. However I quickly found out how to manually delete the spyware, I don't think that would be such an easy task nowadays.

I honestly can't remember the last time I had a virus (that infected me) or any malware, etc. I used to actually play with viruses and stuff for fun, and learned how to code a few that would just be annoyances. (Constant reboot gags, etc)

so all your antivirus are "put for show" only...?

Rarerly, it is easy to avoid to avoid most of that by taking care which software you use and to be security-minded.

My mother and brother have had tons on their computers though...