Originally Posted by pinniped
Does a paid antivirus suite also prevent spyware, pop-ups, pop-unders, adware, malware, trojans, hijackers, etc.? Or just viruses and maybe trojans?
Only viruses -- and not always, with exceedingly limited protection against adware, malware, trojans, hijackers.
In my experience, Ad-Aware and Spy Sweeper and related are often better at detecting viruses than a paid antivirus suite. The one thing that AV gets you, that the others don't, is virus protection from the traditional sources of infection, such as transferring files from a floppy disk or a flash disk, downloading an email with an infection, etc.
Originally Posted by nmenaker
I find that SpySweeper which has more features and is a paid service is very good indeed and acts as prevention.
Spy Sweeper, while good (and probably the only anti-malware currently worth paying for) is only about 5% prevention (Hosts file, Favroites, and home page hijack), the rest is detection after the fact.
As for prevention, there are basically two main, recognized means: Use
SpywareBlaster (nothing really comes close to doing what it does), and use MS IE only when necessary, primarily use FireFox or Mozilla as your main browser.