only wannabes wipe their drives and reinstall unnecessarily.
I guess you mean people that wannabe safe.
much easier, faster, and better for your harddrive to clean the mbr, quarantine viruses, remove spyware and rootkits, fix the registry and delete temp files.
That depends on the situation. Computers are cheap, especially one which is only going to run offline for dedicated purposes needing minimal hardware specs.
and if you have problems deleting registry entries its almost a sure sign of a virus. thats where FileAssasin comes in handy. it deletes the fiile securely, and if the file refuses, it gives you the option to delete it on reboot before it can load into memory. What you suggest is the sloppy and inneficient way of fixing a problem. and in this day and age one single antivirus isn't gona protect you from every virus spyware trojan adware driveby or infected gif out there. throughout my time repairing computers, i've noticed that many people don't even realize that sometimes you have to remove exceptions from your firewall when you uninstall some software, especially unsigned software such as the many variations of QT. my method may be considered overkill, and if it is, that is simply UNJUST. In my book, its more unnecessary to uninstall the entire os to get rid of a single virus. that's just me though.
My method is a no brainer basically guaranteed secure way to not lose bitcoins. That's all I care about. Whatever you want to say about the online computer is not my interest. Tell him to run whatever you like. It doesn't matter, because like I said the offline computer (spending bitcoins) is secure regardless.