It's a jungle out *here*, at the Internet. With so many dangers on the wild, you'd better install some anti-virus (AV) software. Oh, you already did, and you now feel secure. Don't.

As far as I can feel, the most popular AV solution is Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus. This software is regularly posted on the Usenet, and it is (or was) also quite easy to download from... Symantec's own machines!, which is a nearly zero-believable situation. So, not only Norton's proposal sells a lot, but it also gets pirated a lot... summing up to the "most popular" status (www.symantec.com).

For many years, I was a faithful user of Kaspersky's AVP solution (www.kaspersky.com). I once downloaded the 3.something version, and never found better, until the days of the Internet. With the Internet, there came a massive explosion of menaces to the connected PCs. Many of these menaces are still NOT addressed, such as relatively inoffensive marketing trojans, which are ignored by most AV packages - including Norton's (as of January 2002) - and some poorly documented Javascript exploits, usually found at "cracks" and "xxx" sites...

Not only, did the wild got wilder, but the always irresistible need to "try-the-alternatives" set me on the direction of newer AV solutions. That was when I installed Norton's - If everyone else was doing it, why shouldn't I?. Why shouldn't you?

Norton's AV 2002 (the Symantec solution I tried) seems to be a super best friend... It misses some of the "inoffensive trojans" (win32.dlder.exe - for example installed by Limewire), BUT it catches the hard Javascript exploits found at some sites. These exploits should go unnoticed by all firewalls, since they are *not* a threat on a TCP/IP logical level, but - instead - on the much higher browser app context.
Everything seems fine with Norton's AV (NAV, from now on), *but* you'll soon splash on some annoyances. Let me antecipate them for you.

#1) the interface is programmed on top of the Internet Explorer's SDK, and there can be script errors, when activating some options, such as the full system scan. It happens that I did no full system scan on install time, and decided to do it later... only to get blocked by this issue (identified, but NOT solved by Symantec);

...yet, I didn't quit on NAV and kept using it, since I was *absolutely sure* of having a clean system by then, and was mostly interested on avoiding the new menaces.

But, subtly and slowly, I identified more small stuff:

#2) teletext software that trusts on an internal teletext http server (such as Pinnacle's PCTV Webtext) might NOT display the teletext pages correctly;

...no big deal... I can live with that... and NAV remained installed... until the day I found that NAV severely messes with any local loop TCP/IP service, such as the one mentioned on #2)... and such as most "strong" software protections, such as C-Dilla (used by 3D Studio) and FlexLm (used by half the 3D applications)...

#3) to be precise, *any* network TCP/IP event will give you the blue screen of death, on any Windows (including XP), *if* both C-Dilla (any version, up to the recent 3.14) and NAV auto-protection are running your system. The solution is as simple as NOT to enable "auto-protect" on NAV while using C-Dilla protected apps, but then that is the same of not having NAV at all; or worst, because not installing it translates to a "lighter" faster computer.

I wouldn't tolerate running 3D Studio with NO virus protection on the background, so that was the end of NAV. And it was time to look for a replacement.

My hunt for a NAV replacement isn't quite finished yet, but I am running Kaspersky's Personal Antivirus Pro 3.6.1.2 for a few days now, and I might keep it. KAVP is much slower than the original AVP, but it is also more effective.

Good points on KAVP:
- on the pole-position of viruses and trojans detection. I won't say it detects more menaces than all the alternatives, because that can't be said - I don't believe on anyone having the thousands of known malware available, to check if this or other software does spot them, so I can't but trust the publicized numbers.
- KAVP's protection did NOT cause any compatibility problems with any software I have (and I have plenty) - and this is KAVP's strongest point.

Not so good points on KAVP:
- for "large" systems, like my own, KAVP's intense scan strategy, can be too much of a burden. KAVP's behavior is fine for say, 40-80 GB of data... but if you multiply that amount and run network drives, and compressed drives, then KAVP's scanning can be too obvious... there was a moment when I was completely decided to uninstall KAVP, but (strangely?) things improved a ton and, currently, the heavy metal doesn't weight... It might live to tell.
- version 4 crashed on my PC.

So... despite not being a perfect solution, I prefer KAVP to NAV, but the search goes on...