Bitdefender Services Are Not Responding

UPDATE

I have just downloaded an alternative firewall, but before installing it, I discovered that I could scan the installation file with BD2010 (so even though the BD icon was grey, I could right-click any file, and select "Scan With BitDefender").

Then after scanning any file, I found that BD2010 then appears to start running normally and the quickstart icon is once again red, not grey.

However, as soon as I restart my PC, the BD2010 icon is grey again, with the same message as mentioned at the top of this post. Then if I right-click any file (e.g. a text file) and perform a scan with BD, it starts running again.

Any ideas? I am not running any other firewall, and have not installed any programs prior to BD2010 suddenly behaving like this.

Well, the same thing has happened again tonight. I got the message about Bit Defender services being unavailable and advised to restart, and to contact support if the problem persists.

Again, in order to rectify this I did a simple BitDefender scan of a random text file, and the firewall started working again.

This really is not very good at all. The same thing happened to a work colleague of mine too - but for him it only happened once and then was fine after a reboot.

I have come to realise that BD2010 is incredibly buggy.

Is BD2009 any good? I might consider using that if more stable and still available. Any advice would be welcome.

Thanks for the friendly and helpful support I got when I posted my earlier issue. I hope BD manages to improve. Maybe you can work on BD2011 being bug free before releasing it. How about testing it until 2011 instead of rushing to release it? Just an idea. Too radical perhaps?

2009 was my first BD product and I had no problems with it.

Consider yourself lucky that you got to have the trial. I had a trial period for 2009. When I downloaded the 2010 trial, it said it had expired (so I guess BD only lets you give a trial run for one BD product, not on a new product). Fortunate for them, since I wouldn't have bought 2010 after seeing all the updating problems that either aren't being fixed or they aren't telling us they are trying to work on them. Fortunate for me that I used a 40% off coupon and spent under $20.

Yeah, that will be the case GDobbs - just one trial for one version, and no more. Well, this morning I started my PC, and same problem, despite applying the patch yesterday.

Truly disgraceful that such buggy software is being sold on the open market. Disgraceful because when a firewall is buggy, you are putting its users in real danger of attack. On the 2009 forum the mods are actually advising those users to uninstall BD2009 and install BD2010, knowing full well how buggy it is. In my opinion that is criminal.

Can anyone recommend a decent commercial (i.e. not free) firewall? I have 6 days of this trial left while I research, so any advice would be welcome.