Glad I use Parallels + Snapshots

I don’t know how, but somehow this weekend I got some horrible adware/spyware/virus on my Windows XP running in Parallels on my Macbook Pro. It removed my company issued and maintained Trend Micro virus client. It would not allow me to install my Norton AntiVirus client. And it wouldn’t let me install/run SpyBot Search & Destroy.

After trying everything I could think of, I remembered that I had made a snapshot not too long ago. And since all my data was in the shared profile (i.e. in the Mac file system), I wouldn’t lose anything important. So I simply restored to the last snapshot, and Voila!, everything worked perfectly. My biggest pain after that? Re-syncing MS Outlook’s ost file. And I could live with that.