[jyl]

Reformatting and reinstalling OS and apps is a royal pain.

So, after you do it, get an external hard drive and a backup/restore application that periodically and automatically backs up your entire c: drive and allows you to restore from any past point that you choose. Will also come in handy if your c: drive crashes.

Edit - to be safe/sure, I wouldn't merely run the restore app from the infected OS, but would boot from OS CD, format c:, load the restore app CD and then restore. I am not sure if you'd have to do something further to clean out a boot sector virus?

(I have this with Time Machine in Mac OS X. Haven't had to use it to recover from a virus - serious viruses for Macs are still pretty uncommon - but have used it when replacing the Mac's internal drive. Makes a PITA into something quite easy.)