I got asked about this in liew of the recent Windows vunerablity as I suggested this software as a decent free anti-virus. So I created a reply based upon my reasearch. I thought it was pretty relavant for computer users and everyone here is, so I thought I might post it here:
I was asked about the valitity of clamwin software. The person
was worried about it being bad (spyware/virus/etc).
I'd be hard pressed to trust anything 100%. And it's not exactly like
another virus scanner would confirm or deny that clamwin is good or bad,
but I found clamwin on sourceforge. Sourceforge is a base of operations
for open source (free) software. Sourceforge used to be only for the
linux/unix world, but over the last few years windows projects have
started turning up. There is even a project called OpenOffice by Sun that
is a compatable replacement for MS Office (completely free).
They gave clamwin the honor of being project of the month for January
2005. Here is the sourceforge page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/clamwin
You can check the curent bug list, and make feature requests there. You
can even email the programmers.
It is currently in Beta version, but seems to work well on my machines.
I'd say for free it's pretty nice. It's probably not as good as norton or
macaffe _yet_, but it's real close and doesn't charge you $10 a month just
to keep your computer virus free.