i opened an email from a friend of mine and now i have a virus on my computer. without haveing to reformat and install again, what is a good free virus scan. what ever is on my computer will not let avg or norton update or scan the computer.
thanks for the help

Try rebooting into safe-mode and running the scan. If that fails, see if you can run a emergency boot-disk with virus scan oboard.

www.sarc.com has an online virus scanner.

try a bartPE disk and run a scan from there if you need to

As I told you via PM, I would try the free, online Trend Micro scanner.

Many viruses that disable McAfee and Norton leave Trend alone.

thanks guys. i did use trend and it ended up finding 60 different viruses on my computer. it now runs fine.

60?!?!?!? And you say have AVG installed? Shit, better uninstall it then.

If you have comcast, mcafee is free.

i can't blame AVG for this happening. i had turned the computer off due to bad weather and had not updated first before i opened my mail. the virus came from my friends computer and because it was turned off and not updated, AVG did not catch the virus. once the virus was there it would not let AVG or even norton install on the computer. with the AVG out of comission the door was open for the rest.