A few weeks ago a friend got disconnected from the university network for having a machine full of viruses and spyware buzzing away at its nefarious deeds. She reinstalled Windows XP and got reconnected yesterday. Before she could download and install SP2, Norton reported that the machine had 14 viruses, at least one of which had immediately disabled web access. This is a 100Mbit net connection we’re talking about here so it’s not as if the window of opportunity was particularly large.

This means that it’s as good as impossible to put an uncompromised Windows XP machine online.