hehe, teevee - I agree with you. Smart surfing can indeed avoid most problems.
Hell, I never run antivirus software myself. Or ad aware, etc. But I install it on every pc I build for friends/family (which happens to be quite a lot of pc's... everyone thinks that since I work with computers I must like to build them too!). And even with all this protection I still end up "fixing" someones pc every couple of weeks. 
I always install xp for them, cuz its easier to use and looks pretty. 
Personally, I run xp on this machine. Fully patched but no anti virus software and no spyware removal stuff.  But I re-install often enough that I probably just dont notice the spyware.
I do run my email on my redhat machine - outlook doesnt like handling large mail files (my outlook.pst file was gi-normous). The redhat machine rocks. Absolutely rock solid.  But no games or anything interesting on redhat - only work 
