well i guess all i can say is that if i clean up my computer before visiting babble and then i visit babble my computer is okay after visiting babble (except for an additional cookie or two which you similarly get from visiting other webpages).

you might want to read the thread again sky because your question as to what bob is likely to do has been answered already.

one important thing is that correlation doesn't imply causation. i very rarely get junk mail or anything like that. when i get some i start to wonder what i've done differently...

but fact is that people do get spammed sometimes. there are programs that trawl the internet looking for email addresses (this is partly why people write 'at' instead of '@' and 'dotcom' instead of '.com'). i used to get a brand new data mine (used for advertising purposes) every time i visited hotmail login.

adaware is great :-)
i've found a lot less datamines when using firefox compared with IE too, and with switching from a hotmail acc to a gmail acc.
zonealarm is pretty good too (to stop programs connecting over the internet when you aren't aware of them)
no one virus program is able to detect (and fix) all viruses.
i'm pretty sure that it is reccomended that people have 2 different programs and run them regularly, of course.
AVG is a pretty good free downloadable virus check. it regularly requests that i update too, so seems to be fairly up to date with viruses.