From: Harry
The only way to be sure is a complete wipe. Is an hours worth of time to reformat and reinstall your commonly used programs (unless you have an insane setup, it shouldn't take more than an hour or two to get your system working almost exactly the same way it was pre-reformat), or worth the headache and time you lose dealing when your bank account/RS account/etc gets hacked?
Of course not - I'd be silly to say otherwise. But how do you suppose he found out it was a virus? Did he just stumble across it because he disassembles every java applet that he encounters? Probably not. Was he alerted by someone? If so, who and how did THEY know? Did they do that?
Or is it the more likely route, that he/someone else had their AV go off.
I imagine more than a few of the people on our forums are using shared or old computers. I don't know about you, but I keep a good deal of things which are important to me on my computer. For example, my laptop. At 4 years, it's somewhat old and quite slow, but there's too much "stuff" on it. You can't just download all those pictures from a vacation, or that night out with your friends (Of course, ignoring the fact that you should have a backup of important data - unfortunately, many neglect to do this). Reformatting before exhausting other options is downright silly and paranoid. It's a more likely than not a simple exploit, likely put there by some skiddie.
Change your password(s) on another computer (if you're really paranoid, do it on a different network than your own, too) and then exhaust other routes before you reformat. There's simply too much data lost for many people to make reformatting their go-to option right off the bat, just like you don't go to war with a country over something without first trying the diplomatic approach (or, usually atleast ;)).
And of course, make sure it's gone for good, and walk away from the experience with a lesson learned - regardless of how you go about solving the problem.
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E: Look at that, the post right before mine
From: stuffs
Shame I have too many important documents scattered around my computer to reformat.
A prime example of someone with too much stuff to just reformat. Suggesting a reformat off the bat is like being on the playground, and all the swings are being used, so you set the whole swingset on fire - sure, you removed the person(s) from your swing, but at what cost? You just "ruined" the whole swingset.
Admittedly a rather extreme example, but still gets the point of what I'm saying across.
