The board is labeled "Rants and Randomness," so here's a rant for you.

I purchased Norton SystemWorks 2004 back in August of 2004, within a week of purchasing the machine that I still use to this day. This was actually on Phoenix's recommendation at the time, and I was happy with it. The suite did some things that I was thrilled about, such as removing unnecessary registry entries and shortcuts, on top of what seemed like top-notch virus protection. I've been unable to afford an upgrade to a newer version of the program, but I've kept it as up-to-date as possible. My only gripe with it is that it would take quite a while to do a full system scan, though it did like to rifle through compressed/ZIP'd folders during that process, so that wasn't really an issue.

But, as Phoenix has noted before, virus definitions are only part of the battle. Having the program itself as current as possible is also necessary, as some of these things like to find ways around detection with older software. Other programs exist that serve the same registry/shortcut cleanup functions as SystemWorks, and I've had some good experiences with a free antivirus program (AVG) on other machines in the last year, so earlier this morning, I uninstalled SystemWorks and replaced it with a combination of AVG Antivirus and CCleaner. I've not yet run CCleaner, but AVG has been allowed to do a full scan.

It found a trojan. That was planted three years ago. About a month after I'd installed SystemWorks. For the claims Symantec makes about its virus protection, even if the trojan didn't seem to be doing anything, that is inexcusable.

So thank you, Symantec, for creating a program, that I paid good money for, that allows malicious files to slip by initial detection and then exist on a system for three years, even with numerous updates to said program. Perhaps I should have learned my lesson when a version of Norton Antivirus produced in 1997 completely destroyed the only stable installation of Windows 95 I've ever personally had experience with.

I will not be using Symantec software again.

Well, I haven't come across any virusscanner that was able to catch everything (same goes for spam-detectors, cookie-cleaners and malware sniffers). I learnt that lesson pretty much the same way Makou did, back in the day when McAfee was still going strong. The hard part is to find a good combination of software that allows you to have on-access scanning and various non-interfering stand-alone scanners. So far, Symantec as the active scanner and AVG / Kaspersky as stand-alone scanners works fine for me. I just take some extra effort to scan suspicious shit.

Then there's the following problem: some problem is detected by tool A's experimental heuristics to be "Virus-like" or "Trojan-like", but may actually just be a proper DDE enabled program or a harmless hacking tool. For instance, quite a few virus scanners detect my mIRC copy as a "malicious trojan" or give it the title "IRC Zombie" (so .. are they calling me a zombie? ). Tool B's scans take such known false positives into account and don't report it. To the ignorant, then, it looks like tool A is doing a better job than B, while the latter is arguably more up to date.
Not saying that's the case with Makou, obviously, but it does happen and it makes finding proper/trustworthy reviews of AV packages hard to get.

I made sure to note it was a rant for good reason, of course.

I know false positives occur, and I know no software is perfect. I was mostly spouting off because I needed somewhere to air it. I have, however, had enough issues with Symantec's software in the past that I don't think I'll be using it again. At least, I won't pay as much for it as I did this time around.

I've also since discovered that the program was seriously bogging down my system. Things have been running much more smoothly since the uninstall, and AVG does seem to have the same "real time" protection that Norton did. Unless something notably better for my purposes, and still affordable, comes along, I think I have a winner.

And I do use NoScript and Adblock with Firefox. I've had far fewer hits in both Adaware and Spybot since I started using them, and the vast majority of those hits (99% is probably not an exaggeration) are actually harmless.

For the record, my most recent experiences with these things seem to indicate that a friend's mantra of "the best software is free" may not be accurate 100% of the time, but it sure is quite a bit.