Had a Dell laptop show up today. It had a program called "Personal Security" that the user had picked up while browsing the web. As is usual for this type of scareware, it warned of several infections. The computer was "protected" with an up to date copy of Panda Internet Security 2009.

Before doing anything I located the infected files and did a manual scan on them with Panda. It gave them a clean bill of health. I booted into safe mode with networking and copied the install program for Microsoft Security Essentials & the Panda Uninstall applet from another machine on my network. Ran the uninstall for Panda and then ran the Microsoft Security Essentials install, let that go to the web and download the latest definitions, and then put it to doing a complete scan of the disk. It found three seperate infections in about a dozen different files, that came in when Personal Security did. MSSE disabled and cleaned them with no interaction from me. Computer came up clean and ready to go back to work. Almost too easy.

I continue to be impressed with the MS free AV solution.