Hi. I'm new to BitDefender, after my brother recommended it to me. Previously I used AVG Free and was very happy with it until both my brother and father had viruses that bypassed AVG and took a lot of effort to remove. Needless to say I lost my trust in AVG at that point.
Since I installed BitDefender Internet Security 2011 on my Vista laptop, I've had no end of problems with it.
Does anyone recognise these symptoms and know a fix?
Firstly, the system:
Acer Aspire 5630 laptop (Intel x86 CPU, 2GB RAM, Windows Vista Home Premium).
I use Thunderbird and Firefox, and tend to leave these apps running all the time.
When I'm not using the PC I normally put it into sleep mode, waking it up a few times a day to check emails, browse the web etc.
Now the issues with BitDefender:
I installed in "expert" mode as I wanted to have full visibility of what it was installing.
However I left all the options enabled, except for the gaming mode, which I don't need.
Anti-virus, anti-phishing, firewall, laptop-detection etc all turned on, but parental controls turned off.
When I browse the web, often it's very slow to conenct to the remote server, in fact it's so slow that Firefox often times out waiting for a response. BitDefender's firewall is set to allow Firefox (by default, I didn't edit any settings). The firewall control panel doesn't report and blocked accesses.
Similarly Thunderbird often times out when attempting to fetch new mail, it either fails to connect to the mail server, or sometimes it connects, reports how many messages are there to download, then it hangs up.
Usually this problem does not happen after a clean boot, but starts some time during the day when I've woken the laptop from sleep.
If the network apps become unresponsive, I also notice that pretty much everything else on the PC also becomes sluggish, e.g. trying to log off or shutdown can take 15 minutes or more.
Similarly the BitDefender control panel is very sluggish, and doesn't react to button clicks for several seconds.
I noticed one error message today which might give a clue: "vsserve.exe is unavailable". This popped up after I'd clicked on the firewall settings tab and had been prompted for the BitDefender password.
Often the BitDefender tray icon goes grey and if I hover the mouse over it, the pop-up help says that BitDefender has stopped responding and I should reboot. If I do then try to reboot, shutdown takes ages, as previously mentioned.
During that time, I see no CPU or HDD usage, it's as though something in Windows is sat waiting for a timeout period.
I'd be very grateful for some tips on how to debug this and get BitDefender to work properly!
Thanks in advance.
Steve.