Best Anti-Virus/Malware

Depends what you're wanting to be protected against, nothing will stop a targeted attack by a fairly competent coder, any programmer that knows a few basic concepts can bypass any modern AV that's out right now. Most of the really high speed AV's are corporate only and cost a stupid amount of money to get your hands on. That being said I think your best bet would be to make your own and utilize a kernel driver to make use of the PsSetCreate*NotifyRoutine series among other things. If that's out of your scope, I would use ESET or Avira and be careful of what I download and execute.