This week I found out that running Virus protection on everything Microsoft seems to be essential.  My main system was rebuilt a few months ago and I decided that I’d not install AV right away or any kind of protection.  I found out this past week that it’s not a wise move.  While I wasn’t infected with a virus or worm (typically choosing to open a document from an unknown source) I did find I had a trojan that was wreaking havoc on gaming.  I typically have issues with Unreal Tournament 3 and crashes since they can’t seem to fix the OpenAL issue that plagues the game on SoundBlaster X-Fi cards or it bounces back and forth between them and Creative.  Regardless I started having frequent crashes in Call of Duty 4 which has never happened.  I did some reading and found that people were reporting issues and the answer was a trojan.

I initially thought that I hadn’t done anything to warrant the concern but downloaded and installed a few spyware apps and Spywarefigher found an executable residing in my Program Files that looked like an MS patch that it reported as a trojan as well as a few tracking cookies.  I did the clean up and viola the crashes went away.  While it wasn’t a hard lesson learned, it was a lesson learned that running Virus protection is vital for the integrety of even gaming.

Thought I’d post that even if you think you’re privy to something like this, you may want to think again.  I’m still not sure what I did that allowed this to happen but I went ahead and installed AV even with the hit it takes on resources.