It's Christmas. And every year at this time, as families get together to sit down and eat a traditional meal together, there's one ritual that also happens in millions of homes across North America as well.

I'm talking about removing viruses from your relative's computer.

I knew my nephews machine was due for some cleaning, as a few days ago I started receiving strange MSN messages from him, inviting me to download a ZIP file. I knew it was bogus, and there's no way I'm accepting a file like that under those circumstances. He's got a virus. Again.

It occured to me tonight, as I was applying the latest Microsoft patches (which strangely never get applied even though I set it to automatic install), that I actually enjoyed cleaning viruses off the machine. Maybe that's the geek in me. But I have a standard set of tools I use to get rid of the nasty stuff, and I get a certain level of satisfaction when the AVG anti-virus program reports 55 threats found, and is able to remove all of them.

Now I do wish that there was some, sure-fire way, to keep that machine clean no matter what the kids did to it. The problem I guess is that they do need to install software from time-to-time and I live to far to take away their "admin" access and be able to come by to install things as they need. That's not a reliable solution.

But in the meantime, I sit there for hours running anti-virus scans, and anti-malware scans, uninstalling bad programs, removing odd registry entries. And feeling geek superiority over the virus writers for now.