After I found out from the friendly MIT administrators that my computer had been compromised, I had to reinstall my windows OS. There goes my Sunday. It took approximately 5 hours to reinstall, from getting the OS back up, getting networking online, copying over my backups, reinstalling software, etc.

Why is this still such a painful process?

Only cool thing I discovered and enjoyed was installing the new Google pack. I had looked at this when it first came out, but never installed it as I already had most of the other software. The installer is super cool; you can pick a bunch of software (Google Earth, Acrobat, G-talk, etc.) and with one click of the mouse, it will download everything and auto-install the tools you chose. Try it out if you haven’t already: http://www.google.com/downloads