Norton used to be 'the one', but they have gotten both careless and pushy, and it seems like to me that they are just doing the minimum since several free programs have become so good.

There are a couple of 'payware' programs which seem to be rated slightly better than AVG, Avast and maybe Comodo.. but it's not clear to me why.

I read the alt.comp.freeware newsgroup every day, and no one seems to have any problems with the free ones. All I know is, AVG, which I have used abiut 4 years now, updates every day at the time I specify...which is 1:03 PM, for some reason I can't remember now. (You can set it to ONLY update manually, and set it to do full scans on a schedule..etc...but I only do full scans 2-3 times a year, and it never finds anything.)

I have seen only 2 virus warnings in 5-6 years, partly because I 'almost' never download email without looking at it online first, and deleting the spam. I got one virus from an infected friend, but AVG nailed it instantly.