I hope some of this advice is helping with your issues Goat...the anti-virus advice from skuzzy is dead on...also AVG is ok but I've been able to intentionally infect a system with trojans and ad-ware and AVG couldn't stop them...so I never recommend it.
If you're looking for a good freeware anti-virus I recommend Avast first, Avira second...both have effective freeware versions that will stop stuff even Norton and McAffee won't stop...daily anti-virus definition updates...email client, web browser, etc...protection...very light system process load...and if you want to use the "pro" versions, it's only $30/year.
Never schedule a system virus scan...nearly all anti-virus programs have resident real time file scanning protection processes running, and if a virus gets past that, it's too late for a scan to do anything more than tell you "oops"...if you suspect a virus just perform a manual system scan so you know what's happening.