Here’s an article about trojans (no, not that kind) and virii
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/401

Here’s the apps I recommend you use/familiarize yourself with:

Instant messaging client
http://gaim.sf.net
supports jabber (open protocal, but not very popular), aim, msn/hotmail, yahoo, icq, etc.

bittorrent client (multi-threaded downloads)
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Once you install it, you can find search engines for .torrent files, like torrentspy.com, click on the “whatever-song/book-movie.torrent” file and it should open up azureus and begin a multi-threaded download from various locations (this basically downloads chunks simultaneous from different locations, giving you a greater download speed, then pieces them back together, it’s all seamless on your part, you still just get one big file in the end.

p2p filesharing client
http://emule.sf.net
This is similar to limewire, but no spyware/ads, crap.

Firefox (if you haven’t already)
http://www.mozilla.org
More secure, user-friendly browser than MS-Internet Explorer

Thunderbird email client
http://www.mozilla.org
If you use a POP3 email account from your isp, this email client is good. However most people use web-mail these days (ie - Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail).

Open Office (office suite)
http://www.openoffice.org
Free office suite, like MS-office (word/excel/powerpoint replacement. Again, clean software, works well with ms-office documents too.

Gimp (professional graphics editor)
http://gimp.org
Open source replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Free, as always, and quite powerful. I use it for touching up digital images, removing obstructions, powerlines, etc.

When I find or hear about a piece of software that someone recommends, I do 2 things, checkout what it does, and then read the license. If it’s open source, (BSD, GPL, GNU, style license, then I give it a shot). Anything on sf.net (sourceforge) is going to be open source, free, which means that anybody can download, modify and redistribute the code, as long as they pass on the same privileges.

If I don’t find anything good, I usually check www.freshmeat.net, they have apps for both linux, windows, mac, and typically are OSI-Approved licenses (that’s the Open Source Initiative consortium that tries to keep taps on all the various licenses of open source) with a mix of other licenses as well.

If you find windows is getting boring, run of themill same-ol-same-ol, try burning a LiveCD of Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com), it’s the latest and easiest Linux distro to get up and running on. The live cd lets you pop it in and runs everything in the RAM, so when you eject the CD, and reboot, you have your windows back, untouched.