Personal Firewall Day

Yesterday was apparently Personal Firewall Day which is weird that I only heard of it today (as I didn't read my rss feeds yesterday). I would have thought this would have kicked off before the actual day....Anyway - yesterday I was asked to go to a friends who told me they had welchia or blaster on their pc. When I got there I did a quick check of the startup folders and registry and saw nothing suspicious. That and the fact they were running 98 did make me wonder HOW they got infected (as these are nt platform virus's) Needless to say they had no real a/v software on the machine. PC-Cillin98 which had never been updated - so probably 6 years old. NAV was "installed" on the machine - the cd was copied onto the hard disk - so that wasn't helping much :-)
I ran through my various fix_virus.exe files downloaded from symantec, found nothing and then installed the free Computer Associates firewall/AV combo on their machine. All went well until it told me I HAD to update the definitions, reasonably enough, except for some reason it was coming up with 550 errors on the ftp. But a manual download of the file, from the same url worked fine! A standard home user would have had NO idea what to do and would have been left with an annoying popup every time they booted and no a/v protection.
After scanning there were no virus's found but 50+mb of windows updates (not including WMP9 etc) and I wasn't going to download them via dialup!