How Did Bitdefender Total Security 2012 Get Top Review Ratings?

I thought I'd change my existing security S/W when the license expired at the end of the year. I researched what was available and chose Bitdefender Total Security 2012 as it seemed to get very good reviews. From my experience I have no idea how it achieved the scores it got - it seems to be full of multiple issues (my view seems to be backed up by some of the topics on this forum).

I bought a 3 license system, installed it on my laptop, my wife's laptop and my desktop system. My wife has to reboot anytime her laptop goes into standby mode - that is anytime she leaves it for more than about 5 minutes. My laptop does not seem to suffer from this but then again I have Vista on my laptop and my wife has XP. I haven't checked my desktop system and that may be different again as it runs Windows 7.

On my laptop, I get Windows Security Centre reporting at intervals that I have no firewall running, no virus scanner running and any attempts to start the Bitdefender firewall and virus scanner makes no difference. Yet Bitdefender reports all components are running. I also get some web sites that stop working after a time yet others are fine. The non-working sites sometimes come back but more often than not I need to reboot to restore access.

On both laptops, I need to manually request updates and manually request scans. Neither seem to happen automatically as I would expect. I also get malware reports for Toshiba (my laptop maker) S/W that are set as blocked.

I've tried to disable the Bitdefender services (as administrator) but this fails - presumably a security aspect of Bitdefender - and as a result cannot determine whether Bitdefender is the definitie cause of my problems but, then again, they only started after I installed it. In my opinion, this is the biggest pile of doggy-doo that I've had the misfortune to use. The consequence is that I am currently getting and re-installing my previous S/W - it had a few minor irritations but at least it worked and gave me confidene that my systems were indeed protected - the confidence that Bitdefender does not give me. So £40 pounds down the drain but at least I'll have some peace of mind.