Really frustrating - may uninstall soon

I've had bitdefender antivirus free edition for about a week on my Win7 Home Premium machine, and I'm not filled with confidence, to be honest. I had to switch from Microsoft Security Essentials, which is known to be poor and bloated. I tried Avira, but found their endless intrusion into my life from the moment I installed was unacceptable. So I switched to this.

It's a lot less intrusive, which is good. However, I had a few problems with it:

1. 
   The interface opened apparently at random times, requiring me to click on it and click away again for it to close. (It's possible this may be partly an issue with my system, because it does tend to switch active window temporarily from time to time when its resources are low (usually just drawing the second-top window and then switching back), but for it to do this with BD would mean that its window was maybe open and hidden in some weird way.
   
2. 
   There's a feature "Auto-scan" that's on by default, as well as the Virus Shield. Because this machine has limited memory (2GB), I'd like to know a bit more about this and whether it's fine to switch it off and just do regular full scans. But staggeringly, there is NO link on the UI to a help file and, when I finally searched to find it, it seems to be very out of date, describing features that aren't there or have changed their names or don't apply to the free edition, so I can't find that basic bit of information.
   
3. 
   Very soon, I found that BD had quarantined a few executables that I compiled myself in BBC Basic for Windows, one of the languages I write Windows programs in. Obviously, I want to know whether these might be false positives or somehow got infected, but the results tell me nothing, not even whether the threat was generated by positively matching a virus signature or some heuristic analysis that suggested a threat.
   
4. 
   Furthermore, there is no simple way to query this from the UI. Instead, I had to go to the website, drill down in the relevant web form, decide whether to make a general enquiry or send a file, then navigate to the file to attach it manually. I know it's freeware, but reporting false positives or negatives is a service users do for the business and the rest of the community, and should be easier than this.
   
5. 
   There was little indication as to whether BD would get back to me about these reports, so I was left wondering whether to trust the files, which I would like to, or leave them quarantined.
   
6. 
   On registering my account at my.bitdefender, the dashboard said that I had no devices associated with my account, which is kind of weird since I installed BD on the device I registered and visited the website with. The button to do something about this seemed to indicate it would download and install it, which obviously isn't relevant. I drilled down again through the help and contact forms and asked why. I had no reply, but days later find that it now says "YOU HAVE NO DEVICES WITH REMOTE MANAGEMENT", with a big tick, and, smaller "1 active devices".
   
7. 
   However, there's another dashboard at a completely different domain, to which you can log in separately! So I'm not sure whether I should use my.bitdefender.com or central.bitdefender.net (and the help pages are at bitdefender.co.uk!).
   
8. 
   I don't know how long it was before I got a "support ticket" email, but it informed me that I should follow a link where there are instructions on installing the latest BD (2017), which I should do first. I don't know if I have installed an older version, or why their servers should have served me with an older version. Again, the dumb UI doesn't have an "About" link, but it does show directly which version I'm running, which, if these glasses are strong enough, says "1.0.21.1109". Very helpful.
   
9. 
   This raises another issue - the UI auto-closes when you click away from it. This is really unhelpful and annoying, since you can't use Windows Explorer to follow a file path displayed (which are often truncated anyway since the UI is a fixed size), write something from it or drag a file to the UI (which I found was an action listed somewhere, maybe for a paid version). Why do AV designers think it's cool to have really badly designed, non-standard windows the size of a postage stamp?
   
10. 
    So, having logged in (thankfully with the same login) to central, I see the dashboard there says "Add my first device". This is just ridiculous. I've spent hours trying to get anywhere with this, and I'm now hovering over another download link to re-install a different version. Furthermore, this doesn't say that it's an update to the Free Edition, so naturally one suspicion is that this is where I'm being guided to install a paid version, with the unwritten rule (or maybe written in the agreement) that you have to have a paid version to get support, and I've instigated a support ticket.
    
11. 
    That is the first step. I then have to, as it says in the email: " - Navigate to this location: C:\Program Files\Bitdefender\Bitdefender 2017
    
    - Search for supporttool.exe;
    
    - Right click on it and Run as Administrator;
    
    - Wait until the process in completed and send us as a reply to this message, the BDSP_ file generated on your Desktop "
    
12. 
    Apparently, this AV doesn't know what version I have installed, or indeed whether I have any installed at all, or what the version name/number is, or how to automatically run the support tool, if there is one, in the relevant folder where it's located!
    

Really, it would be much easier to get another AV, assuming I can find one that doesn't take over my life. Neither Microsoft Security Essentials nor Avira found a problem with my self-compiled exes, nor did Avast! in years of use on an XP machine. Is that a good thing or a bad one? I don't know, because to find out I've got to update to some other version, then manually generate a support tool file and send it back. Maybe I'll eventually find out why BD objects to those exes. Maybe in time they'll improve the UI. Maybe in time they'll sort out the mess of domains users are supposed to navigate. I hope their skills with virus detection are better than their UI and web design, but why would they be? I'd be too embarrassed to write software as badly organised and supported as this.

I've checked out what's installed, and there's no directory "Bitdefender 2017". If someone can tell me if this update to the 2017 version is the Free Edition or not, I'll make a decision whether to invest more of my time in this.

Thanks.