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And how will they compete with Free software anti-virus?

Speaking of alternative solutions, there's another big difference between this and the netscape/explorer incident :

Several years passed between when the Netscape browser became b0rked beyond usefullness, and before new partical opensource solutions started to rise from the ashes like FireFox/IceWeasel.
This gave plenty of time for the "bundled with and good enough" explorer to gain market share.

In the current situation not only are there already several player with enterprise-wide contracts with big corps, but free-as-in-speech alternatives have already emerged, and those are already good for a lot of utilisation similar as Mozilla and FireFox were at their dawn (ClamAV is routinely used in mail servers), plus solutions to make them really great are being actively developped (built-in mail plugin, available browser plugin, embeding in opensource watchdogs, nice windows suite, etc)

In article similar to this one, Microsoft is praised with the way in which it managed to catchup in the internet field even if it was a late commer. But we all know how microsoft usually catches up : it's solution are often completly botched, bugged, under-performing. Explorer was getting used by a lot of people, but it mostly was a joke in term of security, stability and standarts.
For sure, Microsoft will try to get a similar monopoly on security. But we can be certain that their solution will, this time too, not be very effective or usefull, probably buggy, full of exploits itself, often circumvented by malware writer, and propably turned of by "wanna-be-power-users" because it slows down their computers (which are already falling under the load of viruses and spambots).

But this time, ClamAV, AVG, H+BDEV and Kaspersky will already be there to be promoted as a better solution by articles, just like now FireFox and Opera are promoted against IE's defects after years of IE dominance.

As some other said, Clamwin is a wonderful software using an open source engine.

Although, (as they said) it doesn't have a on-access scanner (which some users find good because it's slowes down the system less and scan only when the user decided), it has a few interesting things :

- it comes with an outlook addin for scanning attachment.
- there's a firefox extension that can scan downloaded files.
- there are some POP3 proxies for other mail clients.
- most of your favorite P2P software & download managers allow to run a command after each download : you can use the function to launch clamscan/clamwin and scan files.

So clamav, even without on-access scanner, can be used to block virus at the most common entry points.
Now, all windows users need is a GAIM plugin to block "lol no its not a virus" IM worms too and will stop 99.99% worms out-there.

Creative's fault?
Why isn't such production plant using a non-networked or unix PC that makes an image of the directory/filesystem after an automatic virus-check with latest signatures -> sending the image over a TX only connection or by DVD?

(l)user errors
On the other side, the home user should have a virus scanner installed; which are available for free; which would also intercept such corporate f*ck*ps immediately (g*ess my * key does not work very well); and which would stop this infected Internet madness a lot faster by updating the virus signatures automatically.

We are so fast in media techniques like media-visual (Flash, ...) which is installed everywhere but still the computerworld is treatened by simple things that could have been avoided by one person, the one sitting behind the computer -> the (l)user, who thinks his PC is having nothing important so why care if anyone "uses" the bandwidth or PC as storage device ... (also called hypocricy)

Certain OS manufacturers
It's ackward, me as PC user is still wondering, I've seen os X and I've been using Windows for years - it's like the beauty and the beast... (-- the manufacturer, Microswoft(tm))

and it only gets uglier...

Well, nowadays, everyone can get their open source browser, instant messenger, mail client, office software...

If an OSS Virus checker caught on and became popular, ( On Going or This) I wonder how much of these zombies would be decreased.

Great idea, but do you have any suggestions? I know there's clamav (GUI Windows version) but where can you find OSS firewall and/or anti-spyware?

http://www.clamwin.net/ is an allegedly good antivirus program.

Also, http://www.spybot.info/ has been alleged to be a good antispyware program.