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[Japo]

The principle of operation of antivirus software is that it will miss anything that's not in its database. So even the best AV (and it's impossible to conclude which one is it) doesn't protect against 100 per cent of attacks, and neither against 0-day attacks.

You shouldn't surf the Web, let alone risky sites, as admin:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/com...eraccount.mspx
There's little that a virus can do if run from a limited user account, nothing important really.

About the virtual machine solution, I agree to what's been said: it can get infected the same, so the only advantage is that it's easier to flush and restore. For a real machine you can use disc image backups anyway. If you factor in the loss in performance, and consider that being safe is not an impossible mission, and that running as a limited user by default is less troublesome than using a VM, for me no thanks.