I have set clamwin to auto-update every hour, but it never does, unless I manually tell it to . What's wrong?

Can you update Clamwin manually? If you use a software firewall, have you configured it to accept ClamWin updates?

Regards,

Yes, I can update it manually. I use privoxy as an http proxy, and I don't use a firewall.

have you configured clamwin to use proxy?

Is the clamwin icon running in the system tray ? It needs to be running for scheduled tasks. This also means you have to be logged on, but i suppose you are.

A firewall is more important than anti virus your box could be zombied and being used for spam, bot farmed out and many other things.

Most of the time you have to do the final act of getting a virus, click the link, read the spam, open and run the .exe.
Not so with what a firewall stops, last time I read about a test of 50 fully patched and up to date win XP boxes connected to the interweb without any firewall it took between 94 seconds and 20 hours for all of them to get 0wn3d. They were just started up and left, and in less than 2 minutes the first one was down, 3 mins 20 for the second....

Good luck.

Malware is becoming multi-pronged, so we need multiple defenses against it, which includes firewall, antivirus, OS/application patches, intrusion detection, and safe surfing. There are Web sites (including governmental/trusted) that have been compromised to serve up exploits to visitors that will evade AV/firewall detection. Spam is becoming integrated with viruses, one piece of malware will call up another, exploits are being customized for your browser type, professional malware design kits are being produced, etc. That's why you see security vendors developing/buying complementary software to their product, such as the recent acquision of Clam AV by SourceFire.

Regards,