this has been done by a company called Advanced Computer Research in the 1990s - it has been proven to be working very well, so well that it was taken off the market (with force / criminal means). Officially the company was sold to an US conglomerate and immediately all products were taken off the market.

It was - in difference to the snake oil antivirus software sold commercially otherwise since then - also able to protect against unknown threats by creating a security focused virtual machine inside the PC and a sandbox around applications. This was the first VM available for PCs (1995)

The only links still visible that I could quickly find are: http://www.securityfocus.com/tools/803 http://web.archive.org/web/19990117023714/http://www.acrmain...