My last experience with Avast was about 3 years or so ago, and I don't know if I'd call it bloatware, but it's either written inefficently, a resource hog, or both. At least it was back then. I ran it on several computer for some time and it REALLY slowed things down a lot, especially loading of programs.

I've run AVG and had pretty decent luck with it until an attempted upgrade to a newer version caused problems with AVG loading properly at startup. I attempted to troubleshoot/fix it, but when I didn't succeed in several attempts I bagged it.

Since then I've been running Avira and I have no qualms about recommending it. It's fast, there IS a free version that covers my needs pretty well, and I haven't run into any issues with it in 3 - 4 years of usage. The free version does pop up an "ad" screen daily when it updates, but you click a button and it goes away.

However, if you're in the habit of opening email attachments without giving it a lot of thought then I wouldn't recommend the free version of Avira since it doesn't include an email scanner. Theoretically any bugs should still get caught when they load, but since there's lag time between the time a virus is released into the wild and the time any antivirus can be updated with a definition/signature/fix, it does raise the risk of infection for those users who don't practive reasonably "safe email".

Just my $.02, hopefully someone will find the info useful.

/tones