From: "Glenn Meadows" 

Did you try the free version again (AVAST) to see if it's only the Pro version?

Did you send AVAST tech support an email with all that you tried?

Did you give AVG Free a try?

--

Glenn M.
"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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