I agree with the MS Security officer, relating to rootkits and potent malware infections.
Reinstalling and not simply cleaning.

That being said, I've rarely reinstalled until the malware infections are 800 or over, sometimes more, but it depends on the type of infections and the way the computer operates. I know a local repair shop that encountered a record infection of multiple thousands in one machine!

I never was the type to reinstall on a virus infection, which gave me great experience in cleaning them (sometimes by hand using a disk editor, that was the Monkey virus among others.).
Don't remember a client ever complaining about my work, though.

If I was an Enterprise System Admin, I would definitely be concerned with "all of the above"!!
In an enterprise, things have a way of going from little to big in "no time at all" and that can affect alot of people.

Anyways, I have no idea where I was going with this post.


In an effort to at least give some value to this post, I make the following suggestion for Windows users (but not dual booters or partition manager bootups):

Get to know and use the MS Shared Computer toolkit.

The way I have it setup, anything (bad installs, malware, whatever) can infect my C: drive and I simply reboot and it's all gone.

My programs return to normal on C:, my data files, application data folder and My Documents stay updated on D: and I have the Shared toolkit unpartitioned space splitting both primary partitions.
If you are confused, read up on MS Shared Computer toolkit.

I've used Goback (successfully for years), Deep Freeze for about a week and some other programs of this nature, I find the toolkit much better than any of them.

Oh....don't forget to make off-site backups of your important files, in case the harddrive/computer takes a nose dive.