[OU] AV programs & Opera

[Sogn Mill-Scout]

First I express my thanks to Raleigh Burns,  John Lewis, and James Card for their suggestions regarding my terrible problems with Opera's crashes and general disaster. Right after I posted about the problem, things got a lot worse, in general, not just with Opera. It turns out we were infected with malware. Why it particularly disliked Opera, I don't know. It took many hours of excruciating tech "support" on the phone with Dell to (apparently) resolve the problem.

We have Norton, and until recently had McAfee. We are not satisfied with Norton, especially after the way we were treated by their "support" people. We're thinking of returning to McAfee,but have some reservations. Among other considerations (installation problems/complexity and cost of tech "support" for example), we are wondering about Opera vis-a-vis anti-virus software. Opera has been running fine since the Dell people seemingly cleaned up the malware last Sat. - something the Norton people had been unable to do a week earlier when they finally got 360 v. 2 working. It detected nothing, then things deteriorated. We wanted v.3 but were told it wouldn't run on this computer and we'd have to settle for v.2. We feel like we're getting screwed every which way and are paranoid about (a) being protected by the currently running N360v.2 and (b) switching to another AV program. 

All this tedious blah-blah by way of asking if there's any consensus among Opera users as to the best AV programs. The concern about Opera in particular is because both Norton and McAfee seem to discriminate against Opera. They both install toolbars in both IE and Firefox, but there is no indication of their presence or protection in Opera. This makes us nervous because we prefer Opera (although we use IE for a few things). Opinions are appreciated. We're inclined to ditch Norton and are torn between McAfee and AVG.

BTW, we're running XP Media Center Edition, version 2002, SP2.

Sogn

Sogn Mill-Scout
Corvallis, OR
ss91 at q.com