Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible: Wow, fantastic.
In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation.
In their defense, rootkits are a wicked problem, for all operating systems, really.
I deal with the malware problem on a daily basis, and I must say that from what I've seen of the security features in the latest Vista CTP, Microsoft appears to be attacking the problem in such a broad and discoherent manner that it will ultimately be ineffective.
That said, his suggestion makes a lot of sense, and not just for combating malware. Things like Ghost can make sysadmining so much easier. If it's not a problem you can fix easily in 10 minutes, just reimage the machine.
SnapShots are a cool feature of VMWare's products. You can save virtual machines state, install some crap, have it blow up, then revert back to the saved SnapShot very easily. What's even better is that they have a free VirtualPlayer available with a bunch of virtual machines availble: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/community.html
I must say that I don't use this at home, since there is a large overhead, but I do use this approach at work. (Just part of the cost of maintain code that was written 20yrs ago...)
If your planning on doing some high risk activities such as P2P etc... this isn't a bad option.
