I just had yet another instance of a Symantec/Norton antivirus product (in this case, Norton Internet Security) causing major problems with a client. She lives in Outlook 2007 on Vista:

- she lost the Reading (Preview) Pane completely
- when we turned it back on, it was empty and would not display the currently selected message
- all incoming and outgoing mail was stuck/hung

Multiple Outlook restarts, Office Diagnostics, and complete machine restarts had no effect. PST file size was "relatively" small, only 550MB.

Uninstalling NIS and running the Norton Removal Tool fixed all problems immediately.

So, as a reward for explicitly buying NIS and getting Best Buy to put it on her new computer a few months ago:

- she lost almost 4 hours of her time
- she has to pay for 45 minutes of my time to figure out what the problem was

She's now using AVG Antivirus (the paid version at http://www.avg.com/home-and-office-security). The "Plus Firewall" version is not necessary on machines running XP SP2 or later, which already have an adequate firewall. I have a number of clients running this product, with excellent success.

For small office networks, I've had good success with the Trend Micro suites.

Symantec/Norton antivirus products continue to receive my maximum de-recommendation/condemnation. Fundamentally, you pay good money for a protection suite in order to make your life easier. Symantec's products fail miserably.

I haven't had any recent experience with McAfee, but a couple of years ago I set up some brand new Dell laptops with McAfee trialware preinstalled. Trying to uninstall that crapware BSODed all the machines; I later found out from Dell tech support that that product could only be uninstalled via a safe mode start. That's the angriest I can ever recall being about a piece of software, and at the time I swore I'd never consider McAfee again.