Hi, above blogpost is from three years ago, because many people who had McAfee installed, were complaining about PC issues and after uninstalling McAfee, issues were resolved. The forums were full of this, so that's why I blogged about it.
This was mainly because of incompatibility issues back then, and/or limited RAM.
I am sure everything works smoothly again now and I haven't seen this issue for a while. The only times I see it is when people are having it installed on an older OS with limited RAM (which makes sense), or using older versions.
McAfee is still a great AV solution.

Yes, there is a possibility your external drive could be infected. The only way to figure out is to have an up to date Antvirus scan your external drive.

Post removed. Thanks for the mention. Looks like the post was edited afterwards.

Hi,
If you need help, please see here: http://www.mivercon.be/forum/thread-2612.html

Do not delete those files, because those are the legitimate ones as explained in my blogpost. Also, above variant with the sysaudio.sys file doesn't exist anymore as this infection has been updated many times already.
If you need help with the popups and redirects, please register at my forum and post a HijackThis log: http://www.mivercon.be/forum/thread-2612.html

There are many variants of Sality and Virut. Here, I am mainly talking about the ones that infects legitimate files and scanners fail to properly disinfect them (in most cases because of the buggy infector itself). Extra note, I don't know if Ad-Aware Pro actually has the ability to disinfect files, because disinfecting and deleting are two different things. That's why, for file infectors, I recommend you use an AntiVirus solution which can actually disinfect infected legitimate files.

If I'm not mistaken, if you have Eset Smart Security Firewall, then it automatically disables Windows Firewall already. Also see here:http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2421&actp=RSS

It looks like your exefile association is broken.
See here how to fix this: http://filext.com/faq/broken_exe_association.php

Thanks. Unfortunately, my time is limited lately, so I have not found the time yet to maintain/update my blog.

Unclear what link you are talking about. If it's above link, then I'm usure why Norton flags it as there's nothing suspicious/strange there. That page doesn't even contain any scripts.