Good for you, Don! Personally, I don't especially care for Firefox, and prefer Opera, followed by SeaMonkey. but I stress that I'm just talking personal taste in this. All three of the modern browsers are technically excellent, and just switching away from IE to one of them reduces your infection risk by a very significant factor. I estimate better than 50% risk reduction, although that very much depends on your other security habits.
Some revision: essentially there are 5 main ways that spyware and viruses get into your machine. (Not listed in order).
1: Direct infectors ("worms"). Use a firewall for near-100% protection. A hardware firewall is best, but the built-in Windows XP firewall works just fine.
2: Email attachments. This hasn't changed in many years: if you open the attachment to an email without checking it first, you are at high risk. Use a good, up-to-date anti-virus program, and don't just rely on it to catch everything, help it out by thinking before you open stuff. If in doubt, just delete it unread. (Show me the law that says you have to open every stupid email people send you.)
3: File sharing. Simple rule: don't do it. If you have to run (e.g.) Limewire to download movies or music from dodgy sources, do it on a second machine, either one you don't care about (it can be an old pile of junk running Windows 98 you can just format when it gets infected) or else on a non-Windows box that is pretty much immune to infection (a Linux machine, for example). Don't fileshare on your main machine.
4: Browser exploits. Internet Explorer is the big risk factor. Do not use IE. Use any of the three excellent modern browsers: Opera, Firefox, Seamonkey. Or all three if you like. I suspect that Opera may be the safest of the lot, but if so only by a small margin - all three are vastly in front of Internet Explorer.
5: Common sense. No matter which browser you use and how good your firewall is, if you deliberately download and run something nasty, it's got you. Think stuff through before you download. Is this a reputable source? What happens if I type "Product X" and "spyware" into Google? Am I sure that I'm at the genuine Product X site and not a fake one?
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