As a long time computer weenie let me offer this humble advice:

Protecting yourself 'taint easy: The attacks are many, sophisticated and persistent.

Keep your OS patched: The days of waiting to hear if a patch causes problems before installing it are over.

Remove IE and Outlook from your computers: True Sasser is independent of IE/Outlook but most of the other 45,754 known nasties out there in the wild take advantage of various shortcomings in them. There are lots of alternative browsers and mail clients to chose from.

Install a virus scanner: Turn it on, and leave it on and keep it updated.

Install a pest-scanner: Pest-patrol, Ad-aware, Spy-bot.....

Install a fire-wall: Use it to block unneeded ports. Best is to place a router that provides NAT(Network Address Translation) between you and your internet connection.

Pay attention to the attachments in your e-mail: Learn what can hurt you and what can't.

....and most of all do your backups! Right now!! It's not if your computer will die(from hardware failure, virus attacks, worms...) but when.