>>Please this is not spam.
>>
>>I need to replace my bootleg AV program and want suggestions.
>>
>>P.S. Michel, this is for real. Please do not delete.
>
>Nod32

Thanks Metin and Tamar and everybody. I'm running Nod32 now.

Here's a repost that I made at West-Wind threads since I posted my question there, too.

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Here's my story so far:

I bought BitDefender for $30 (I should have done their 30 day free trial).

Anyway, BitDefender really slowed my machine down a lot.

And then worse I noticed that it was trying to test my accounts on the machine for Weak Passwords. I noticed this because I have security auditing enabled for a number of security events. It was happening every 30 minutes. I disabled the checking for weak passwords in BitDefender, but that didn't stop it at all - every 30 minutes...

I Googled it and found that some poor sucker with BitDefender detected the same 'security' attacks and he did a full reformat and re-install of the OS to try to make it stop. I can't blame him. I was pretty freaked out when I saw the Security logs.

Since I'm not as brave as Rick Strahl to not run any AV, I'm now doing a 30 day free trial of ESET's NOD32. This product seems to be more of a stripped down AV without all the features that BitDefender has, but that's now what I want. The perceived performance of my machine has improved significantly over BitDefender and even over Norton which I originally had.

Unless anything really strange happens I'm going to pay for NOD32. It's $59 for 2 years.

Thanks to all.