Annoying Software Program

I have been using AVG Antivirus for more than a year now. It is free and quite effective in doing its job. Recently I was forced to upgrade from Version 6 to Version 7. Though I think V7 is more powerful, but it does have a few annoying issues.

Below is some usability problem I experience with AVG7 default setting:

1. It had an E-mail Scanner, which constantly connect to your email server to scan emails for viruses. It is quite annoying to see a small popup at the right corner every 10 to 15 minutes. Especially when the network is down, the popup will stay there (won't go away!) until it can establish a network connection with the email server. When I turn off the E-mail Scanner totally, the AVG Icon on the System Tray will turn into Grey colour as if it is no longer active. Everything my computer startup, it would popup a balloon dialog to tell me my Email Scanner is not fully functional. Can you just leave me alone?

2. Today the worst thing happens. Somehow AVG automatically schedule some testing to run on 9:00 am while I am still using the computer. There is no indication of some king of scanning or testing is running, but I notice the computer is slower. I popup the Windows Task Manager and see that avgw.exe is the culprit (looking at the AVG Scheduler double confirm that). The Bugger is using almost 100% of the processing power to do some sort of scanning (which I didn't approve of) while I am doing my work, how stupid can you be? Worst still, it lasted for hours and made of my application hang (because most of the processing power are hogged by AVG), and I totally lost a blog I was writing. ARGHHH! Then I decide to shutdown the AVG Application, but the stupid scanning process still keep on running. You left me no choice but to restart my machine. I set the scheduler to execute at midnight where the machine is sure to be off (I am not allowed to delete the scheduler task!).

AVG6 used to be less intrusive, but AVG7 sure have some fatal usability issues since it annoyed me so much. I shouldn't complaint so much since the program is free, but it is pathetic if your upgrade is worst than your predecessor. AVG7's performance and effectiveness is good, but usability is equally important for a successful marketable product as well.