BitDefender Internet Security 2011 14.0.24.337
Reviewing 10.2 (Feb 4, 2008)
I just got done becoming disgusted with BitDefender Internet Security 2008. I don't know why this posting hasn't been updated, but I did try the latest version.
The AV has good detection, yes. But there were so many serious bugs I just couldn't stand to keep using it. For one thing, each time an application needed to connect out, the firewall would alert to the DNS attempt (a good thing), but would not put up an alert on the connection attempt itself. Invariably, the application would time out, and the connection would fail--except for the rare application that offered to retry the connection. Serious firewall flaws. I've never seen such an issue in any other.
The firewall alerts have "A" and "B" as accelerator keys. This means that if you happen to be typing when an alert appears, you can very easily accidentally (and unknowingly) Allow or Block a program's connection attempt. This is not far-fetched; it actually happened to me within a half hour of running BitDefender Internet Security 2008 (fortunately, it wasn't malware that was accidentally allowed).
The anti-spam component didn't work at all with Thunderbird on my system. Oh, the toolbar was there in the message windows, but none of the emails I received were scanned, the email/spam counts remained at 0 the entire time, and the spam test string (from the BitDefender readme) wasn't detected. Serious anti-spam flaws.
I noticed huge, random slowdowns. Sometimes, running Thunderbird took eons. Sometimes, merely deleting a message in Thunderbird took eons. Not always. Fun stuff, this randomness.
By default, BitDefender doesn't update if a scan is running. The problem is that if you start a scan, then stop it and close the scan window, it thinks the scan is still taking place--until you restart BitDefender or reboot. This means if you start a scan and then cancel it, BitDefender won't update itself until you restart. Serious updater flaws.
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