Wondering if Windows 7 is Safer

My Nortons was disabled. Shut down and ran a scan in Safe mode: nothing found. I have the latest Nortons Internet Security package. I switched to an older drive that I was using about 6 months ago, and I'm running off of that for now. I have a lot of files so I backup entire drive to other drives. I have four drives and I switch internal cables. Unconventional perhaps but I do all my own hardware maintenance and I set up this system before they invented all those cool external USB drives. I had the Google redirect infection in December so I'm running out of clean drives. This is my last one. It checks out ok, and works ok, no indication of problems. I've been taking some looks at the K drive, which is the one that's infected and I'd like to clean it up because I need the data that's on it. Don't need to preserve the OS, in fact it might have multiple problems due to the Google redirect thing not being entirely gone, maybe. So I don't want to mess with it much. I'm not sure what's safe to do. I ran ERUNT on my current drive. MBAM says my current drive is clean now. It found some adware, minor stuff. MBAM doesn't find anything on the infected K drive. QUESTION 1: I ran GMER on the infected drive and it found a lot of stuff that was obviously bad. But GMER seems to freeze up my Nortons and that made me nervous so I'm afraid to run GMER again until I find out if this is normal behavior. I need my good drive to stay clean and be safe. When I run GMER, then Norton's won't open up after that. Is that typical? QUESTION 2: I'm seriously thinking of buying a WIndows 7 computer this week. Is Windows 7 a safer OS than XP? Seems I've been having too many problems recently. QUESTION 3: I suppose, my primary question is this: Can I get the data off my infected drive without risking further infection? I need everything in MY DOCUMENTS folder. I already retrieved my Outlook Express files and that went ok. Cyndy

#1. That's not unusual #2. My understanding is Windows 7 is safer, but any OS can get infected. #3. If the files in My Documents are that important, I'd copy them over to the good drive, scan with MBAM and your anti-virus program.

Oh, thank you. Your replies are very helpful. I needed to verify whether I was doing anything wrong or not. I'll rescue my data and then make entirely new backups of the clean drive. Thank you as well for the utilities that you recommend. I'm impressed with ERUNTU and MBAM especially and will continue to use both from now on. Cyndy