TSGL: AVG Free AV vs. Avast AV ???

[Lee Bunyard]

I've been using the AVG Free anti-virus program for a number of years 
now on a number of different pc's and have been very happy with it.  
Have never had a virus infection on any of the pc's.  Lately I've been 
running the AVG Free AV product on a desktop and laptop.   I use the 
Mozilla Thunderbird email client and on both my desktop and laptop, the 
AVG 7.5 Free program provides a "Personal Email Scanner" module that 
scans the incoming and outgoing Thunderbird email.  It also scans email 
for the IncrediMail email client which my wife uses.  When scanning, AVP 
pops up a little box pops indicating that it is scanning email.  My 
desktop went south several weeks ago and I purchased a new HP desktop 
that runs Vista Premium Home edition OS.  Once I managed to get rid of 
the annoying Norton AV product popups that the new MS computers come 
preloaded with, I decided to download and use AVG Free AV on the new 
desktop.  After going thru the frustration of trying to find the free 
version of AVG on the www.grisoft.com website (they do everything they 
can to direct you into one of their paid products), I finally found the 
download site for the AVG Free version and downloaded the v7.5 product.  
It installed OK and works fine EXCEPT that, while the email scanner 
shows that it is functioning, it is definitely NOT scanning the 
Thunderbird email.  When I check the AVG settings and properties for the 
email scanner, it shows that the plugin it is using is for MS Outlook 
Extension.  In other words, there is no plugin showing for Personal 
Email Scanner, which apparently is needed to scan email other than MS 
Outlook.  The HELP files for AVG indicate that I need to checkmark the 
Personal Email Scanner in order to scan email other than Outlook but 
there is no Personal Email Scanner there.  I've downloaded and installed 
the AVG Free v7.5 product three times now trying to figure out what's 
wrong but I get the same thing each time.  I just went and checked the 
AVG Free product on my laptop and it is running the same v7.5 of AVG and 
it does show that the Personal Email Scanner is in place and working.  
The laptop is running XP Home OS.
Anyone running AVG Free experience anything similar to this problem, or 
have any thoughts on why I can't get the Personal Email Scanner plugin 
to setup during installation???

Second issue.  Last nite, in frustration with the AVG Free installation, 
I went out and downloaded the Avast Free AV product.  It setup and 
installed OK and is running and apparently working OK, including 
scanning incoming and outgoing Thunderbird email but it appears to have 
DRAMATICALLY slowed down my new desktop pc.  Particularly on bringing up 
graphics in webpages using the Firefox browser (my preferred browser).  
Is this slowdown normal when running the Avast AV product??  If so, I 
probably won't continue to use it.  There are 7 scanning modules with 
Avast AV--Internet Mail, Network Shield, P2P Shield, Standard Shield, 
Web Shield, Instant Messaging and Outlook/Exchange.  I turned off the 
modules for Instant Messaging and Outlook/Exchange since we don't need 
those functions but the pc performance with Avast is still much slower 
than I ever experienced with AVG Free.  I'm not sure whether I can 
safely turn off any of the other modules since I'm not really sure what 
their function is.  Any thoughts from anyone who is using the Avast Free 
AV product??

Thanks for any thoughts on these problems.
Lee in the Mountains of Northern California