From: Gary Britt 

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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