Storm Worm-Still A Threat?

Two articles published on the web on the same day offer differing thoughts about the Storm Worm and it's impact.
First, this article from UK's Guardian Unlimited states the Storm Worm is gathering speed and "that more than 90 per cent of the world's PCs are vulnerable. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide." The article takes an ominous tone and questions if there is yet a yet unseen ultimate future purpose for the botnet.
However, a much more reassuring article at PCWorld tells us "the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example...Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time."
PCWorld also quotes a network security analyst, Brandon Enright, as saying "the vast majority of those [infected computers] have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network."
Whatever it's true purpose, the botnet to date has mainly only been used to spread itself or to tout penny stocks in 'pump and dump' spam. According to other research I've read, the number of infected computers has dropped from last month to now quite probably due to Microsoft's malicious software removal tool updates being pushed out every month.
Here is a link to some security tips you can use to generally protect your computer against spyware and viruses. The first tip is a little dated, IE 7 is far more secure than previous versions, but if you're using it you have to make sure it's IE7 and not an earlier version!