Avira Premium Anti-Virus Bug Disables Windows Machines 151
New submitter Adesso writes "Anti-virus vendor Avira is having difficulty with an update of all their Premium customers. An update that has been downloaded over 70 million times is causing the 32-bit version of Windows to block almost all critical applications. Avira has responded promptly with an interim solution for this problem. In most cases this causes Windows to not boot properly."
AVG had a problem like this years ago (Score:5, Informative)
When AVG caused a boot failure several years ago I switched started switching everyone who asked to Microsoft Security Essentials; still seems to be the best free one. At work I'm happy with NOD32; I suppose that they could have a similar problem, but they've been really good so far.
I've seen this before (Score:5, Informative)
My list of serious bugs in AV products:
Panda (ancient versions) - failed to install correctly, impossible to uninstall. Two botched Windows XP installations.
BitDefender (relatively recent) - very messed-up definition file marked ALL executables as infected, putting them in quarantine. I still have the feeling any malicious executables would not have been marked.
Kaspersky 2012 - screws up Windows Home Server (v.1 and 2011) connector, has to be disabled for backups to work
McAfee - Won't even protect anything if the license has expired. Still bloats up your computer, though.
Norton - everything you've heard is true. It's impossible to uninstall, it's a resource hog, blocks stuff randomly...
The one exception so far is MSE - considering the amount of malware the others have caught so far (less than 10 times, if you count tests as detections), how light it is and how it doesn't piss you off, it's my favorite.