there's some more people talking the issue out over here:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=68054

i'm very much like tricia - if i literally don't go anywhere except academic pages on youtube, there is an exceedingly low chance i'm going to run into a virus on this machine.

but, i keep my access speed very low for this reason, and the reality is that there's nothing on the machine - and i'm happy to run an automated format/reinstall if it gets dirty, through whatever accident.

my concern is malicious hacking from the outside in, not picking up random worms or viruses, and moving to windows 7 isn't going to protect me from that.

i need to point something else out, though - this isn't your average windows xp machine, it's exceedingly stripped down to nearly nothing. i've ripped out almost everything, and that means that it's probably actually safer than running a stock seven, which has all kinds of goodies for bad guys to use.

what's going to actually happen if i pick up a worm is that it's going to error out because it can't find the system files it needs to operate and replicate.