Hi, I was just negligent and accepted some image files (2 pieces) from a person I have no reason to trust. To this person I could be considered a high profile target, so I'm a little bit concerned about this, as a friend of mine who is knowledgeable in IT said I could be vulnerable when accepting image files through Skype. My friend doesn't seem to be taking my concerns too seriously, so I was wondering if anybody could give me input on this.

So far I've uploaded the files to www.virustotal.com. And they came back 0/52. I also used trend micro housecall to scan my PC, as well as ran Malwarebytes and both of those came back negative too.
I am willing to wipe my system clean and reinstall Windows if necessary, but that's just my usual response when in doubt, because there is too much on the line to be negligent when it comes to online security for me. What do you guys think I should do? Should I investigate this further and run more low level scans (such as from the sticky)? Am I being overly paranoid?

Given what you've found so far then you're probably fine. It rather depends what you mean by high profile target; do you think this person is actually likely to be after you?

Your post doesn't mention that you have any AV product installed and running on your machine for realtime protection. That would of course be a further layer of reassurance.

You're clearly aware of why you shouldn't accept untrusted files. You might also want to look into the free version (at least) of Cryptoprevent as a further line of defence (although for the avoidance of doubt this wouldn't help you retrospectively unless the files are malicious but haven't yet deployed a payload, which is possible but unlikely).

And the other thing you should be doing if you don't already is always running as a limited user account rather than with administrator rights.

I run Microsoft Security Essentials in the background. I'm usually very thoughtful, but was not in this instance.
By high profile I don't mean that this player is likely to be after me, simply that I'm known to be a player with funds to this person. So a potential target.

I've heard the limited user account argument, however a lot of programs require administrator rights to run (Pokerstars for example doesn't run on my computer without administrator rights). Also I'm told HM2 doesn't run properly (by the HM team) unless it has full administrator rights. I believe on a limited user account I could still run these programs by manually entering the administrator password each time correct?

I've never heard of Cryptoprevent. I'll try that out.

Yes, you should run as a limited user and set your shortcuts for certain programs (eg Stars and HM2) to Run As Administrator. You will need to enter the admin password each time.

MSE is not commonly thought to be very good, btw. You may want to consider better (still free) AV programs going forward.

Ok, thanks for your help. I remember back whe I first started running MSE it was considered decent, but it's no effort to switch to another free alternative.

You could try BitDefender, Avast or Avira if you are looking for something else.

Thanks, I think I'll switch back to Avast, that's what I used to use before MSE.