Question about old Virus'es

I've had dial-up for the past 10 years, 26.4 at that...ugg....

In 2001 I got NAV and it hammered by resources pretty hard...so I ran it periodically...the def's ran out and I never bother to re-new as I just didn't like the product. I never worried about a virus because I always felt like I was real careful about my email attachments and I surfed slow enough to where I could notice all inbound and outbound traffic...(kinda like a poor man's firewall)..

Anyway, I recently got DSL...WOW.....

I am currently demo-ing NOD and like it alot....I expected to have some virus'es on my first run since I hadn't scanned in 2-4 years (again low dial-up speed) but NOD didn't pick up anything except the S&D password stuff and a few 'possible' macro virus'es in some commercial .doc files....

My question is...could I still have some sort of infection that could already have damaged some stuff? IOW, will NOD pick up virui (sp?) or their effects if they have come and gone? Do virui hang around all the time or do they do their dirty work and disappear?

Also, one time while I was deleting some temp/cache from IE...I got a warning about a virus in and .htm file....I didn't think htm's could have virus, obviously I was wrong...does somebody have a list or link of file types that can't contain a virus...(ie. exe/com/bat/pif can....jpg, gif can't, etc.)

Thanks.

 

A virus usualy doesn´t care too much about cleaning up. The goal of a virus is to replicate and survive. I recommend to run one or two webscans (like Trendmicro Housecall or Bitdefender Scan Online ), just to have a second opinion.