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Steve - I suspect that those "trojans" are probably heuristic false alarms. Especially if it was software that you paid for, and was made by a reputable company.
Wait until rootkits become more popular, and they start writing themselves into firmware on videocards/soundcards - don't laugh, it's most certainly do-able. Pretty much can't get rid of the suckers without removing hardware and buying new stuff to replace it.
As to AV - I can pretty much guarantee that if I really wanted to, I could find software on the net to write viruses that would get past pretty much every AV on the planet. If you really want to be safe, don't have a computer. Seriously. As Hudson in Aliens said:
"it's the only way to be sure".
Jen - I'd say your problems are stemming from a very tired Windows XP system, and possibly viruses on it. Ignore the fact that you had AV software installed on the system, in reality, it means jack you know what. I found conficker on my dad's PC, and he had McAffee AV (up to date too) on his system...so much for that ;-) Oh, and Trendmicro's online AV and Norton's online AV found jack, it was up to Kaspersky Labs online scanner to find it.
I have no experience with AVAST, but it does rate very well - few false alarms, catches a very high percentage of both known and viruses in the wild. There are other tools to employ to help keep an eye on your system, but you have to know what you're doing and know what is right, and what is wrong on the system. I can usually tell from a quick scan of HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\cur rent version\run in the registry what is right, as well as from processes, system startup files (start > run > msconfig.exe), services etc.
This sort of thing is why I prefer a UNIX or UNIX like system - security by design. There's nothing like a freeBSD jail chroot system ;-) mmm actually, Solaris containers will do the trick as well.
Dave
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