Microsoft is developing a product to remove adware and malicious software from PCs, the company's chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates has revealed.

Gates prides himself on never having been infected by a computer virus. But he has been forced to remove malware from his home PC, which has led to the new project.

"This malware thing is so bad. For now that's the one that has us really needing to jump in," he said in a speech to a crowd of technologists in Silicon Valley.

"Probably as a result of that [malware] experience, Microsoft is going to itself provide malware-cure software and keep it up to date on an ongoing basis."

Gates pleaded for more help from standards bodies in securing the internet. As a result of the net's openness, viruses are able to spread around the world within five minutes, he said.

He believes that protocols that offer isolation are the answer, but feels his plea gets overlooked.

"That's actually been an open question and it deserves more debate than it has gotten. It's not just the software element, the very protocol can get us a better foundation."

But he also admitted that there has been too much naivety around social engineering.

"We thought that if we told users: 'This might be dangerous, think about it,' that people would think about it."

But users ended up receiving so many warnings that they started to ignore them altogether, he said.

And he predicted that a similar user recklessness means will lead to companies moving to new forms of authentication.

"We are going to move to some sort of smartcard biometric authentication," he said, adding that it might take five or six years and would be "extremely costly".

"It shows that culturally Microsoft is paying more attention to security," commented Glenn Edens, vice president of Sun Labs, after the event.