I always use a firewall and anti virus but I only use free ones.

Window's own firewall in Vista is fine for me and for anti virus I use Avast as it's free and autoupdates.

I was a longtime AVG user but switched to Avast when AV started misidentifying loads of files as viruses and it got on my tits.

The best thing about Avast is that it autoupdates about 10 times a day.

Every couple hours I'll hear some American bloke telling me 'your virus database has been updated'

Makes me think he clearly knows what he's doing so I can just browse away happily