The title kind of says it all - following a virus signature library update, Microsoft Security Essentials popped up a warning that my lappy was infected with "Win32.Zbot", and when I told it yes, go ahead and clean the system, it closed Chrome, dissociated it as the system URL handler and disabled the executable. No, Microsoft, that's not suspicious at all. A mistake anyone could have made, really.

Here's the kicker though - after the requested reboot, I had no problem opening Chrome again. No idea how it healed itself or if MS half-assed a recovery patch. Anyway, my settings, history, cookies, all that crap were right where they should be. The only hiccup was that Chrome couldn't detect or (re)set the default browser. So I opened Firefox, set it as the default browser, unset the option to keep asserting itself as the default browser. Next time I opened Chrome it detected whatever Firefox had twiddled and asked if I wanted Chrome to be the default browser, and that re-associated Chrome as the system default URL handler again.