I kill computer viruses with my bare hands.

I've been having nonstop problems with viruses for almost a month now. They're trojan horses that exploit some sort of weakness in Internet Explorer and do all manner of irritatingness like open up popups in Explorer and slow my computer to a crawl.

Now, wait a minute... Didn't I uninstall Internet Explorer from my computer over a year ago? Am I not a religious user of Firefox? Well, of course.

But the thing about viruses is that they're tricky little bastards. The ones in question added themselves to the registry underneath the startup menu, which meant two things: no antivirus program could touch them there, and that they'd automatically start downloading the moment I'd turn on the computer.

So day after day the antivirus program would repair infected files and I would uninstall Internet Explorer. This would in turn cause the virus to say "Oh shit! I'm missing crucial files with which to work my asshattery and drive Erin nuts! I must download them again, but only through Explorer because it's the only program sucky enough to let me through the back door."

To which my computer, the ditz it is, would say "Oh no! A program is trying to open Internet Explorer and it doesn't exist! I have to download and reinstall the program!" Intuition and intelligence are not my computer's strong points.

So first it would reinstall Explorer without my permission, and then through Explorer it would redownload itself and then pop up Explorer windows telling me I'd better slap that sumo wrestler quick or else I'll lose my chance at a free ipod.

This was getting time consuming so I finally took the plunge into the registry and removed the damn thing manually, all 112 entries. It was scary because I knew that I could cause irreperable damage to my computer but after three hours of staring at the gibberish that they name all those system files I was ready to reboot.

Maybe it's a little early to be claiming victory but I'm going to do it anyways. I haven't had a problem in 12 hours. Yay me!