Gouwe gozer: Hmmm
Come to think of it, an anti virus that does absolutely nothing would also feel perfectly OK
How sure are we that the Avast is really doing something?

rabbitoid:  avast! has intercepted and warned against a number (I'll say about a dozen over the years) of trojans and other threats against my system.  In some cases that's involved particular files being quarantined, or strong recommendations to immediately disconnect from particular web sites.  I'm afraid I can't PROVE to you that these threats really existed, but I take these warnings at face value.

If necessary, I could probably dig up a log for you.  I'm pretty sure the software keeps some kind of record of such incidents.

wetware: I was just kidding. I was about to suggest that a good test would be to download a virus from the web, try to run it and see if the antivirus screams. But I wouldn't want people to actually try that

rabbitoid:why not test a virus? on a virtual system???    ;-)

By the way: any recomendations for the following task:
after installing a fresh system (xp pro sp3), all the drivers and a couple of daily used programs i want to save the whole thing in order to make it easy to re-install the complete thing.

I found "paragon hard disk manager" but even the trial-version does not allow me to do this. Are there other recommended programs?

diogenysos: Well i have Driver Max running on my XP system. It checks for Driver updates daily.
Also it keeps a copy of all your drivers on there system, which you can set to download if you do a fresh install as you say, THOUGH i have never tried to do that.
As for programs, surely you can just download the most up to date version ?
Funny enough, i am just about to do a fresh install of XP on here, and the one great pain is re-installing or the great software, maybe some bodkin should come up with a way of cloning the Program Files folder

diogenysos Norton Ghost can be used to make a clone image of the drive. And later on you can return the image back to the drive. Company i used to work for years back used Ghost all the time..