I turn off my virus protection, but I'm behind a router which works as a very nice hardware firewall. I also never use Internet Explorer. I know you can set-up IE to block pop-ups and other badies, but it just too much trouble trying to stay ahead of the junk! I use Opera, which works very much along the same lines as IE, but without all the spam attacks. Altho it won't "sort" the HTC score pages

I use
FSAutoStart Before running AH. Its very easy to set-up, and very hard to screw up. Reason being is if you tell it to turn something off that you shouldn't, and your computer locks up, or crashes, all you do is reboot and everything is back to normal. It makes no changes to the registry. You can set it to clear your ram, close all unnessisary programs, then start AH, all with one clicl of the mouse. I use to rebot my computer before flying just to keep everything clean, but I don't have to with this program.
From what I understand, while running AH you are not subject to any possible attacks unless some one is activly seeking to hack your computer. Picking up viruses and spam and such is from programs you install, or malisious web sites that drop nasty stuff in through cookies and active X stuff. So as long as your not ALT/TABing out of the game a browsing the web, you should be pretty darn safe even with out virus and firewall protection.