I don't know how, but I managed to contract... something... It happened today, when I didn't download anything, didn't go to any new sites, or anything like that. All my usual spyware/virus stuff was running, and it's not even an especially malicious virus, it's just eating up a pretty decent chunk of my memory.
Basically when I look at my task manager, i see "IEXPLORER.exe" running up around 60,000k of memory (upgraded to IE7 [I don't care about it, I use FF] and now it is "iexplorer.exe" in the TM). I close the task, not even 10 seconds later, the "iexplorer.exe" has reloaded and ramped way back up to 60,000k of memory.
McAfee (out of date) isn't getting rid of it, and Lavasoft Ad-Aware isn't getting rid of it. System Restore to 3 days ago, no change. I have no idea what this virus is, so if you know what it is that would help. I'm sure I could solve the problem by just uninstalling IE, but Microsoft has made that damn near impossible. If you know of any amazing antivirus programs that are free or cost under $30, tell me about it. As I said, this isn't malicious, but I pretty much can't run any programs without noticeable run-time delays, which is pretty impressive because I can run WoW without any of these problems, and it uses much more memory.
Edit: I also get a little IE popup spam whenever I start up FF... odd...