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[jonh_sabugs]

The sad reality is that antivirus programs only offer an illusion of protection these days. Recent studies have shown that AVs will only effectively catch viruses when they spread to a large population, sometimes after infecting systems for months or even years. Fact is, any programmer with average level of knowledge can create a virus, and in theses cases, less than 10% will be caught immediatly by existing AVs. So, staying away from suspicious sites and not executing crazy stuff is still the best protection. Also, disabling scripts and stuff as mentioned eariler.

As a side note, some viruses simply cannot be detected after infection. Properly rootkited ones will hijack your OS and manage to conceal itself completely. Only with external scan, like an OS from another partition/HD would be possible to catch it. And yes, these have been observed in the wild.

(I haven't used AVs in ages also).