Well the good news is, the email you received, PJ, is itself a hoax. It originated in 2006, and is simply being recirculated now. It hasn't even been updated; it uses the same wording as was used back then.
If the information had been true, the virus would be listed on the McAfee web site, as well as the CNN web site. Actually, it is listed on McAfee's site -- under the heading, "Virus Hoaxes". Many other credible sites list this as a hoax as well.
The truth regarding this matter is that yes, there are some emails going around promising to show folks pictures of Bin Laden's body. Opening these emails will not destroy your computer; opening attachments in emails can, however, expose your computer to a virus. Also clicking on links that are embedded in the text of an email can lead to a web site that will attach malware to your computer. It's just good prevention to never open attachments in emails unless you know what they contain and trust the person who sent them. It's also good prevention to never click on a link in an email.
Again: Just opening an email will not infect your computer. Even if the email contains attachments or links that carry virus or malware code, the virus cannot infect your computer unless you open the attachments or click on the links.
A huge percentage of the "warning" style forwarded emails out there contain misinformation, if not out-and-out lies. It's really easy to fact check these messages before passing them on and scaring everyone in your address book: Just copy a key phrase from the email, paste it - in quotations - into a search engine (like Google), and add the words "snopes, urban, hoax", without the quotation marks, and then hit 'search'. If the information is a hoax, it'll show up as such in the search results. Then you can let the person who sent it to you know that it was a hoax, and perhaps they will then send a correction to the folks they sent it to.
