bill - 5:18 am on Oct 26, 2009 (gmt 0)

Bill, does this SteadyState also alert like a firewall if certain suspicious programs are trying to request outward ?

Not to my knowledge. Essentially it works to freeze all of your settings. It's like taking a snapshot of your system. After you let all of these people use your system you simply revert to the original state. All of the changes they have made are removed. There are also some features of SteadyState that let you limit access to the rest of the system.

I checked the site out but it makes it sound like SteadyState is only for shared computers. My PC is mostly not-shared.

Yes, but it will be shared when your guests visit. You would want to remove or disable SteadyState after your guests left.

And does everybody think Norton 360 is crap ?

I'm not a fan either. As mentioned above, their corporate level software is not bad, but the consumer level packages seem to cause more trouble than they're worth.

Take a look at Microsoft Security Essentials [webmasterworld.com] if you want something powerful but unobtrusive.

alright, so I made a Guest account

I don't know that I'd suggest activating the Guest account. The Guest account in XP [support.microsoft.com] is used for other things on your PC. It might be smarter to make a new user account and then limit access from that.

How much better do you guys think the security has gotten with Windows 7 ?

MUCH better. If you could use Windows 7 you'd have an easier task of locking down a non-Admin account. You could apply parental controls to the account which let you control the times the PC can be used and sites that can be visited, etc.