yes you defintely need virus protection!!
you download zone alarm for free and that would stop and
trojans from accessing your computer and will also notify
you of such activity. you can find it at download.com also
they have some free anti virus protection there, nav is
probably best though...
Stay connected to the Internet for a couple of hours tonight and I can
almost guarantee you will get the msblast.exe worm. Your system will
have svchost.exe crashes, complaints about NT Authority, RPC errors and
general system crashes.