Are they joke?
I'm just amazed by the number of false positives McAfee seems to be generating at the moment. I've never had a particularly high opinion of it and this has done nothing to enhance my view.
Now granted false positives are a fact of life but you'd think they would be less with giant corporate anti-virus solutions since they probably have more programmers than they known what to do with. I've had a few false positives with Avira (Antivir back then) and I found their programming team to be very responsive. They had a solution within 24 hours. That impressed me a lot.
My current employer runs F-Secure (as my former employer did) and that, IMHO is a complete pile of junk as well. Whenever I'm away from my computer and my screensaver comes on, when I return and screensaver goes off, F-Secure generates an out of memory error. WHAT!?! The program crashes? Apparently! 
Not very impressive. I can't be bothered to tell my bosses what a complete waste of time F-Secure is because when I've done so in the past it has fallen on deaf ears.
I still run F-Secure (I'm sure I could remove it) because I want to cover myself in the event of some data loss. However, I have very little faith in it's ability to protect my files, so I always take my own precautions.
I haven't heard any better things about Norton either, one of the other big names, so I have to wonder why would you ever bother? My only conclusion is that people buy computers with trial versions of these programs on, and then when they expire, buy a full version because they feel they have to, or don't know any better. This irks me that big corporations can abuse their position of power like that.
What's wrong with the free solutions? I wrote an article on my website a while ago about using free alternatives and staying safe in general. I think I might have to do a follow up and again highlight the woeful lacking found in commercial solutions like McAfee. Plus I can add some new Anti-Virus tools to the freeware arsenal like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and TotalVirus.com (thanks PA.c for that one!).
Sometimes you don't get what you pay for. 
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I encounter viruses that antivirus cannot (or will not) detect, and I encounter false positives that I think are purposeful attempts by the antivirus companies to stop software that they believe may have an illegal purpose. It seems to me is that all that antivirus software is good for is for finding old viruses that have already infected millions of users. I can't even remember the last time any antivirus product I've used detected a real virus.
the real old methods, making some signatures database, and serach with that. No big point of doing it today, the variations of malware are creating itself automatically so it looks like most search for some recent malware is done at pure heuristic level or just searching for unusual events on the system.
For me at work, it means, before I start do some work on hardware and embedded servers etc, I have to switch any antivirus off. After work, I let the system to be scanned, but during the work nothing will work. I have to operate some embedded servers via telnet sometimes for hours, this is simply blocked by many security suite. I have to make udp broadcast search, blocked by most security software. Etc. etc.
So coming to work in the morning, boot up my PC, right click on the damn antivirus icon, select disable and start work. Daily procedure and there is no workaround.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Microsoft Forefront Client Security is payware, but in this case you do get what you pay for.
I've used it for several months now; in that time, I've had 0 false positives. (I use about 138 apps, so that's an excellent track record IMHO)
I've also done a lot of malware analysis in those several months; out of approximately a dozen nasties (including several rogue AV's, a couple of malicious PDF's, and a browser hijacker that even MBAM missed), MFCS only missed detecting one. I sent the malware to Microsoft - their reporting system was actually easy to use - and the definition was in the database within 24 hours. (I believe it was 12 hours, actually, but I'm not completely certain - it was definitely within 24)
Microsoft has definitely screwed up with some of their products, but this isn't one of them. I, for one, am hooked.
With regards to freeware, I've heard good things about a combination of Avast! and MBAM; I haven't actually used them together, although I have used MBAM several times.
I'll be getting my first taste of the Avast!-MBAM combo over the weekend, when I fix somebody's computer. I'll let you guys know how it goes.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
I am pissed at UAC and Comodo Firewall.
I bought Age of Empires 2 and installed it on my Vista Machine. UAC blocked and deleted a key component of the program due to it editing the registry a bit too much and Comodo blocked and isolated some other key parts without my permission. now even with a fresh install i cannot figure out what went wrong. called microsoft and they basicly told me to go Fdisk myself. comodo has been useless seeing as the version i have (free) has no phone support. now i have a 20$ game that i cannot use (its NOT 7 compatable nore will it work in WINE)
Mir be mad. Mir be VERY MAD