What ever happened to..

I remember way way back, when dos was young and programs ran.. only what you told them and when, and while viruses and the like existed, you kinda knew you had one, coz well with 640k being "mega" nothing much got in there without some knock on effect.

Now, today, Im running etrust av, windows defender and spybot.. the first 2 claim to "stop" anything from infecting me, so, and believe me I check my settings, but today, firefox (which is good against most stupid things) successfully downloaded without my permission and further more RAN the downloaded exe which then blocked everything.. and I mean everything, cant dir c:\ coz "log on privilages disabled" blah blah blah.

So, I ran a check with the av (as a different user who could still login thank goodness)..

Nothing

So, I ran windows defender check...

nothing..

ran spy bot, found sometrackers, a couple of exes that werent in memory, but.. hey..

anyway, my pc is back with me, so something it found must have been it.. but.. Just how many of these types of "keep me safe" products are you realistically needing to run to stop most of these things when nothing at all seems to actually stop it happening in the first place, only try and clean up afterwards.. grr