One of the very few things I've managed to get my largely non-techy family members to grok is that “thou shalt always run anti-virus and firewall programs”, so when my brother's copy of ZoneAlarm started bitching about his Windows ME no longer being supported I was naturally the “go-to guy”.

Luckily I had a spare copy of XP lying around, so I gave that to him, along with a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD. Unfortunately, he ran into some issues and I ended up popping over for a visit to do the install for him.

As it turned out, the slipstreamed disc was buggered, so I upgraded from the official XP disc... which was bad because:

1. The upgrade from ME to XP unbeknownst to me switched off the virus checker and the firewall
2. There are evil people out there just waiting to pounce on fresh XP installs as soon as the connect to the Internets

By the time I'd got the Windows update page up there were thirteen Messenger spams (most suggesting the registry was corrupt and I should buy their product) up and an extra winiogon process running. By the time I killed that and disconnected, it was too late and some 200 executables were infected.

I've took his PC home to fix; I've copied all the data files onto CDs and reformatted. As a way of apology, I've stuck in a spare CD-R drive I had around, as well as some extra memory and an ethernet card.

But... damn, the speed that the PC was fucked was brutal. I've been running security systems on machines I've owned since I had an Amiga, so I guess I've missed out on the experience until now.