Can anyone tell my of an antivirus/firewall the really works?

I have tried nortons, pc cillian, bit defender, panda and have always got a virus....I spend alot of time online and do alot of downloading...sometimes from underground sites..so far no antivirus has lived up to their own hype I always get some kind of virus or torjan and I read and follow the doc. for these programs... but end up having to reformat my hard drive again and again help!!!!

Can anyone tell my of an antivirus/firewall the really works?adware

avg free from grisoft is good. also try Spybot Search and Destroy, they find most things and also provide a guard/immunization feature that alerts you of changes and viruses. I've had them both running for years, and while a few virus and trojans occasionally slip through, I haven't had to do anything as drastic as reformat a drive for many years. hopefully, you are running XP with the XP firewall on (no exceptions) and have all the security updates.

between the XP firewall, AVG anti-virus, and Spybot S%26D, you should not have any major problems. Windows XP of course is not free, but if you're still running 2000 or 95/98, then you're probably just asking for it. Sounds like you are anyway with your "underground" downloads. Be more careful/knowledgable about what you're doing. Hackers/malware can find their way around just about anything, if you help them by downloading carelessly.