Should I Renew Bitdefender

I have just received an e-mail offering me 6 months free if I but a one year subscription.

My experiences with Bitdefender have been mixed.

In the first year I used it, I thought it was a great product. It never once interfered with the performance of my PC

That all changed in the second year. I was forced to upgrade from the standard antivirus option because it would not work along side my Zonealarm firewall. At no extra cost I had to start using internet security and that in my opinion has been the worst piece of security software I have ever had the misfortune to put on my PC.

It immediately slowed down my PC to slower than snail pace and the technical support offered was in my opinion very lacking as I do not believe the support team could A) handle the volume of queries being raised through this forum and Did not have a clue what the solution to my problem was.

In the end, I had to disable the antispam element of the package because it was deleting e-mails from my system which it considered as SPAM. Bitdefender as much as accused me of lying on this saying that it cannot delete messages. Well I assure you it did, because they disappeared somewhere between the webserver where I had been reading them at work in the day and were not there when I started Outlook.

I also had to disable Windows automatic update because when that tried to run with Bitdefender running at the same time, my computer just hung every time.

With Bitdefender Antispam disabled and Windows automatic update disabled, I've had no problems.

But I don't want to be paying for a product that is not compatible with XP and only works when certain of its own elements are shut down.

I'd like to switch back to the bog standard antivirus.

And so my question is this ... What is the consensus of opinion of Antivirus Pro 2011. If you think it is not up to the job, what recommendations do you have for an alternative AV?

Thanks in anticipation