How to identify Viruses

As per someone's suggestion, I installed Sygate Personal Firewall on my PC. The ability to manually block all applications is handy, but the problem is I'm not sure which applications may be viral, or which are normal windows-based stuff that I should be allowing. Some of the names are self-explainable, like AIM or Realplayer, but there are others like winlogs.exe, LEXPPS.exe, and so on that I have no idea what it's for, or if I need it.

So I need a checklist of sorts of common virus names, so I can weed them out with this program. I just very recently had a problem where, after a minute from starting up, I couldn't access my taskbar or any of my desktop items (I would get an hourglass icon), and if I tried to restart, the Shutdown/Restart options are left blank, and all I can do is Log Off. Nasty little bugger.

For a virus scanner, I have NOD32. I also use Ad Aware. If there's anything else I should be using for added security, please let me know.

Jam it back in, in the dark.