[george76]

Thanks for your comments.

What is your opinion on dropping Norton in favor of AVG, Nod32, McAfee, BitDefender, or Sophos , etc.

[jdm]

I'm not American in Tokyo, but my observation is that people who have been loyal to Norton stay loyal to Norton, regardless of how the product performs today vs. when they first started using it.

I would ditch Norton and use AVG instead. And then update and run Ad-Aware and SpyBot every other week and only update and run the free online scans, i.e., Trend Micro, Panda, BitDefender if you suspect your computer is really messed up.

[American in Singapore]

"What is your opinion on dropping Norton in favor of AVG, Nod32, McAfee, BitDefender, or Sophos , etc."

I can't comment too much on the consumer side - I just wanted to point out that the vulnerability was not as catastrophic as portrayed.

Symantec's latest corporate edition, version 10, has anti-spyware, anti-adware, and some Intrusion Detection capabilities. I don't know when and what version that these features are in the Norton consumer product line, but it seems that having the A-V, anti-spyware, and anti-adware in one package is better than maintaining 2 or 3 different products that provide the same functionality. So you might want to compare those features with the other products that you mentioned.

But, people can get almost religious about their choice of A-V software and I don't really want to get into that fray :-)