I bought Clamwin Anti Virus as part of a package of programs from Open Office. I've downloaded it, but run a scan only once because it was very very slow. McAfee completes a scan on my machine in about 45-50 minutes. Clamwin ran something over two hours.

First I should ask, are you familiar with Clamwin, and if so, what's your opinion of it? Assuming the answer to the first part of the question is yes, does it normally run slow?

http://www.clamwin.com/

ClamWin Free Antivirus is a non-profit free software project. Such projects are often initially unoptimized works in progress.


My only warning to you is you may encounter serious problems if you run two (2) antivirus tools at the same time. They could compete with and/or interfere with each other. Disable or uninstall one of them.



Here is a link to some of the most common antivirus tool choices:

http://www.virustotal.com/en/virustotalf.html

If you are thinking about switching (using a real-time AV tool only one at a time), there are some good free Antivirus programs that are decent, including AVG and Avast!.
AVG: http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
Avast: http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

Thanks for this advice, I think I'll stick with McAfee. It's doing the job so far as I can tell.

Vop,
I decided to try out AVG, since it had your recommendation, but other programs - notably Celestia -seem to be running slower with it on the machine. Is this what you'd expect?

I decided to try out AVG, since it had your recommendation

There was no specific recommendation intended - they are simply the most commonly used (and decent) FREE AV options. Is McAfee up for renewal? It is generally considered very effective but is too bloated is some people's opinion.


If you did not completely uninstalled McAfee, there may still be running components or other interactions that could interfere with the proper operation of your PC. Celestia, a free space simulation, is likely very resource intensive in any case. But, if they are all running - probably not good. What are your CPU and RAM specs, and free HD space? What are the game's minimum requirements?


Have you run the READ FIRST Procedures found here:

http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread.php?t=32403



Lets see a HijackThis log, please.