Go immediately and get WinPatrol (http://www.winpatrol.com/), the best thirty bucks you'll ever spend. It can't protect you from everything but it does a great job of protecting you from drive-by downloads.

I also run Vipre from Sunbelt (they got bought by somebody, I can't remember). I've never had to use the service but if you get hacked, they will fix your computer for you.

It's a jungle out there.

I use ICE all the time as a quick-and-dirty panorama maker because, as I have said here before, all you need to do is throw some overlapping images at it to get a fast panorama. If you need fine tuning, use Hugin which will also "catch" some images for a fast panorama but can be manipulated in creative ways.

Working in the Pinacate Volcanic Field in Mexico, I do a lot of panoramas, some by hand and some with a GigaPan Epic robot. When I use the robot, I also use their software. For the the hand-held stuff, Microsquash distributes Image Composite Editor (free) which is dead simple to use. Throw some images at it and get a panorama rikki-tic.

My other tool is Hugin which is open source. Like ICE, it can catch a bunch of overlapping images and gen up a quick pano out of them. BUT, with some care, you can pick the matching points between images by hand and it can correct for different densities between images.

Attached is a hand pano of the World's Goddamndest Volcano stitched with Hugin. The outward facing slope in the center is carpeted with bombs (round rocks that flew) averaging half a ton mass.