From: "Rich Gauszka" 

FWIW - at times throughout the years I've been bitten by most
antivirus/firewall software. My current feeling is to treat them as
temporary items and to have several alternate pieces of software that you
are prepared to move to rather quickly.

I currently use the Free AVG for VMs and CA's antivirus that was free with
my AT&T/Yahoo DSL


"Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news:466e23ec$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> I've been using Avast on three machines for about 2 years.  I've been
> using the free version.  Well wanting this "good" program to keep its
> development I decided to support the Avast team by buying a pro version
> license of the program.  I installed the latest version and entered my
> license key. Everything seemed to be going well until about 3 weeks ago.
> When suddenly my email wasn't working properly and then eventually not at
> all.  Internet was OK but neither Thunderbird or outlook express would
> pickup email.  I would get server suddenly terminated connection errors.
>
> Well, I then spent untold hours tweaking, upgrading, and then completely
> uninstalling my firewall.  Then I tried several download and online
> antivirus scans and spyware scans.  Nothing.  I used LSPFix and
> Winsockxpfix; No Help.
>
> Finally, I was talking to a tech support person at my ISP about the
> problem and he immediately suggested I try turning off Avast and see if
> that made a difference.  I thought well it can't possibly be Avast I've
> been using it on this machine for 2 years at least with no problems, but I
> gave it shot and sure enough it was the damn Avast that had my email
> reception (I could send just not receive) all screwed up.
>
> So I uninstall Avast, clean up my registry, run some more virus scans and
> spyware and rootkit scans, uninstall and reinstall Firefox and
> Thunderbird, and upgrade internet explorer to IE 7.  Test and OE, IE,
> Firefox, and Thunderbird all working perfectly and picking up email
> perfectly.  So I do some investigation and decide to try NOD32 as my
> antivirus.  Install it and everything is working great.  Feeling confident
> that I've got whatever it was screwing up my email fixed and thinking
> there must have been something screwed up with my install of Avast, I set
> about uninstalling NOD32, cleaning my registry of any NOD32 or old Avast
> entries, and then download and reinstall Avast Pro.  Enter my license key
> and everything seems to be working fine.  Try my email and BAM same
> problem it doesn't work, can't pickup email with either Thunderbird or OE
> and now IE and Firefox don't work 100% right either (but them mostly
> worked).
>
> Well that's the last straw for me, I guess I'll just have to write off my
> purchase of Avast Pro.  I've uninstalled Avast again, cleaned the registry
> again, and reinstalled NOD32.  Things working great again.  I checked the
> Avast website expecting to see a slew of reports of problems like mind,
> and I did find a few, but nothing anywhere near the volume or recent
> nature that I expected.  Avast always blames the firewall, but my problems
> happened with or without ANY firewall and with just the windows firewall
> in place.
>
> The only good to come out of this is that from the reviews I've read NOD32
> is rated right up there with Kaspersky as the best detection engines, but
> several reviews indicated NOD32 was the favorite of gamers and people who
> wanted the least amount of resource and computing power hits from their
> antivirus software.  It definitely seems to be much less consuming of
> computing power than Avast, and it does a full scan of my hard drive in
> about half the time Avast took.  There is no free version and its
> interface could provide a bit more context sensitive help now and then,
> but after my 30 day evaluation period expires I expect to pony up the
> $39.00 for a license.
>
> Any thoughts on all of this??
>
> Gary

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