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"Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool is an utility designed to remove all types of infections from your computer. It implies effective algorithms of detection used by Kaspersky Anti-Virus and AVZ Antiviral Toolkit. Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool is not capable for real-time protection of your computer. As soon as your computer is cleaned you are supposed to remove the tool and install a full version of antivirus software."

It's what the above promo text suggests. A Windows program to do manual virus scans on your machine in case of an infection. However an already infected system might not be possible to be cleaned while the virus/trojan is running. Spyware usually contain sophisticated self-disguise technology and hide themselves from "normal" access to the filesystem. So in case you want to use this, you should put the infected hard drive into a trusted, clean system and install the tool on that PC.

Kaspersky used to have a Gentoo based, bootable ISO called RescueDisk, but unfortunately it's out of date. It solved the problem of running the scanner on a clean system though.

To get a clean, bootable Windows CD, you might want to check out UBCD4Win (Ultimate Boot CD for Windows). According to the list of tools page, it already contains the Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool (in the list it's called "Kaspersky VRT").

Now this is something. A linux based security suite integrated into an USB stick! It works by installing a low-level driver into the PC's OS (of course this is a Windows only stuff ) and redirecting all network traffic through this driver, which filters the data through the appliance's security mechanisms. They say that this unit provides an all-in-one solution: firewall, spam-filter, anti-virus, bla-bla-bla ... Actually the only problem with this is that the whole stuff is only as secure as the Windows (driver) architecture allows. And I don't trust that too much. :-> I'm not naive: most probably Mac OS X is not much safer from a technical POV, but it's got a lot smaller user base and thus is a less attacked platform. And on the other hand, it's working a lot better and that's a significant aspect from a user's POV.