Trend Micro PC-cillin came installed on my 2-year-old Dell XP laptop and I've been quite happy with it. I particularly like PC-cillin when it alerts me real-time to the presence of a trojan like it did earlier this evening.
Had I stopped with deleting the file, if it weren't for Windows Defender I would have still been infected. The bad news is that Defender permitted the files to enter the system, the good news was that it gave me enough information to purge the bad stuff myself.
I knew two things about my situation. 1) I had a file named 4M6kG58x.exe in my \windows\system32 directory I needed to delete asap, and 2) there were a bunch of scheduled tasks queued up to do something bad on my laptop.
I forgot to take a screenshot of my tasks window, but here are the evil tasks awaiting a one-way trip to hell from Recycle Bin purgatory.
SEO keyword insertion: At1.job, At2.job, At3.job, At4.job, At24.job
I was impressed with PC-cillin for catching the trojan before (at least I hope it was before) it did its evil work, but I'm disappointed with both PC-cillin and Windows Defender for letting things get as far as they did. I tightened-up Defender's default actions, so hopefully next time it will do more than record the trojan on a clipboard and wave it on through the front gates.
A new Vista PC is on my Must Buy list. To prevent this evening's Trojan encounter from occurring again, perhaps I should add a new Vista laptop to the list as well.