No offence to Norton users, but the reason that you don't "appear" to have any problems is because your virus scanner CANNOT detect most new viruses, so you never know when you have been hit. I work in a computer shop and I have 5 technicians who spend, on average, half of their time cleaning REAL viruses and spyware off of systems "protected" by Norton, McAffee, PC-cillin (pre-2005 release), etc. At $70.00/Hour we make some serious coin off of people who think that they are protected. Even though I work here I still get duped and end up with shit on my systems. Eset has an anti-virus program, NOD32, that is pretty good and is NOT a resource hog like Norton. The one that I am running now is Bit Defender Pro, again easy on the resources. The new PC-cillin 2005 is apparently the number 2 defender against viruses (behind BitDefender, I believe it was in Info Week). I hated the earlier stuff so I refuse to try this version.
Spyware needs a multi-faced attack because no one program gets everything. The big three will do the trick (Microsoft, Ad-Aware, SpyBot). I took everything but Microsoft off of my home PC and got hit with some Newdotnet shit (last night), so I put the other two back on. The Service Pack 2 pop-up blocker is a necessity though!