I've been working on a few of the machines around the house, specifically the ones that my wife and I use. I had been a really big fan of BitDefender AV for a couple of years. My brother-in-law had pointed me towards it as being low profile and low maintenance. v10 had been, but when I switched to Vista x64, v10 didn't support it. I contacted customer support and they nicely extended my subscription so that I wouldn't lose time while I waited for the 2008 version to come out

Well, 2008 was a little more intrusive, and a little more high maintenance. They took out my absolute favorite features: allowing you to shut down after a scan and place a desktop icon for a particular scan. That was great for putting the program on other people's machines and making an easy way for them to scan.

The 2009 version brought back the shut down after scan option, but also a lot of instability. Sometimes it just simply would not load properly and required a reboot. Checking their customer support area showed similar problems and an almost complete and total lack of assistance from the company on resolving the issues.

I was particuarly upset to see that their support regarding getting their anti-spam feature to work in Thunderbird, was to either switch to Outlook, or turn it off. The new parental controls they were touting only worked if the machine was on a standard account, otherwise blocked websites popped up a window asking if it should be directly added to the white list. I want my kids to be able to install programs and I don't want to have to set up a domain just to make is so that a program written by half-wits will function.

So the only option left was to uninstall BitDefender and put on something else. That's no big deal. In addition to the standard windows uninstall, BitDefender has a "hard" uninstall utility. I used both and made a shocking discovery.

I'm no programmer, or IT professional (as I'm often making sure everyone knows), but what it looks like is happening is two things. First off, they replaced some vital part of the network dlls in windows and didn't give me anyway to restore them properly. I noticed this because of numerous network errors. On my wife's machine a "Diagnose and Repair" always resulted in an unsolvable connection error, even if I was able to connect to the internet. On all the machine's involved, the Toleda driver that translates IPv4 to IPv6 was permanently disabled. While that's hardly a necessary driver, it's problem seemed to have been more of a sign of other problems than a symptom of the true problem.

Things didn't stop there though. It also looks like BitDefender used part of the Visual Studio 2005 redistributable, but without actually installing it. This made it so that an uninstall of BitDefender would break other programs that needed AND make it impossible to install it again for most people with my technical knowledge or below. I tried installs followed by uninstalls with and without registry sweeps. I tried copying registry entries from working installs to non-working installs. I even tried manual uninstalls etc. No dice.

So all of this lead to me having to do complete reinstalls on machines that had been newly setup in the last couple of weeks. If someone out there reading this happens to write code and also have the cluefullness of a chipmunk looking for seeds in winter, let me tell you something: Make sure your installs and uninstalls work before pawning them off on the public.