Recently switched from AVG to avast!, couldn't be more pleased - much more streamlined and unobtrusive - automatically updates without shoving windows in your face. AVG was somehow crippling my internet browsing speeds too...don't know why or how, but, once removed, problem gone.

Greetings!

The "link scanner" thingy is easily disabled in the browser.
Add-ons in Firefox; Supplements in IE7.
AVG doesnt show any error message.

AVG had a huge number of false positives for me. avast! hasn't been too bad. Anything is better than Norton.

Does anyone here use the corporate versions of either Symantec or McAfee? I've always heard good things about those, as opposed to the home user junk they sell.

I'm forced to use McAfee Enterprise version 8.0i and it's still junk. Less junk than their retail abomination, but junk nonetheless.

AVG has gotten so bloated and kludgey in the past two years I no longer use it, preferring Avira instead. I don't know why more people haven't heard of it.

http://www.free-av.com/en/products/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_a...

I haven't used an antivirus product in years, and I've never had a virus despite full use of email, bittorrent, Usenet and the like. The answer to viruses isn't bloatware, it's common sense. Don't open executable attachments, don't run newly posted warez until after a few weeks so that others can be the guinea pigs, view the source of HTML email before following suspicious links, run Firefox with NoScript and Adblock when surfing unsafe areas of the web, use a good firewall (OpenBSD's pf)... It's a lot better than trusting your system to the likes of Norton or McAffee.

I quit using AVG. It was tagging any kind of a keygen as a trojan. The search result safety rating feature seems to slow down searches too.

Wait, what's the real problem here? Running an OS where getting anything done pretty much necessitates running with full-bore administrative rights. This is how system-level files can get infected in the first place, and it should never happen on a modern OS.

I'm surprised that XP allows that to happen, actually; I'd have thought that even if user32.dll wasn't locked while the OS wasn't running, the System File Protection system would kick in and immediately replace the deleted file.

Vista 64bit FTW!

The lesson here is to never use the free stuff. You get what you pay for.

AVG seems to be having a lot of problems this year. Earlier in the summer they sent out an update that caused a false positive, which freaked my aunt out so much that I moved her over to avast; last year a friend got infected despite running avg. And they made that awful design decision to scan links by default, which pretty much hoses people on slow connections even when everything is working correctly. I haven't trusted them in a while now.

Virus scanners employ a kernel-mode driver (which is why you need a separate version for x64). Anything with that level of system access is going to be able to cause havoc if it runs amok, and that's true on any OS (as anybody with buggy kernel mode video drivers on Linux can relate),

USER (along with GDI and KERNEL and a couple of others) is one of the fundamental pieces of Windows. It's unfortunate that Windows doesn't recover better -- boot into the recovery console, say, or have a version of the system file recovery that runs in the console -- but there's no way it can boot at all without USER so I'm not surprised it falls over.

Now, does I need to install Avast or some crappy A/V at home ?

I haven't used an anti virus in years. As long as you're wise about browsing the information super highway, and what emails you open, it'll be pretty hard to get one. Save lots of money in the process.

I LOL'd but if you're on the a** end of that, then it sucks.

I don't see how AVG could let that happen.

Avast! 64 bit for the win!

it has been doing the same thing with the driver for portable devices in my WinXP install at work.

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heh, oops?