good ideas
Good advise trunyard. I also like to boot with puppy linux to drag and drop my mbam or and ccleaner, etc to the desktop of Windows pc. This prevents infection of my thumb drive, as has happened to me in the past. I use ext3 on a thumb drive to hold my security programs to avoid being able to use it on a win machine.
I also turn off system restore as many problems can reside there as well.