avast,MSE and windows firewall

you should never have more than one antivirus running at one time. I would suggest to you to remove avast. MSE is faster and has a better interface (in my opinion) and avast could have problems, being a third-party solution. Whatever you chose as your configuration, simply remember that you should have ONE, not zero, not two, ONE firewall, antivirus, and spyware running at the same time :)

btw, you shouldn't be afraid to install your windows 7 ultimate 64 bit ^^ I am using 64 bit right now and I find it much improved

StealthyBoss said:

is it safe to have all these running at the same time?
or shall i just stick to mse and windows firewall

no !

as Pichu stated use only one antivirus at any one time

StealthyBoss said:

is it safe to have all these running at the same time?
or shall i just stick to mse and windows firewall

Yes its is absolutely safe and its a very tight security setup.

Dinesh said:

StealthyBoss said:

is it safe to have all these running at the same time?
or shall i just stick to mse and windows firewall

Yes its is absolutely safe and its a very tight security setup.

Dinesh, not to be critical, but isn't it bad to ever have more than one real-time protection at one time? I haven't heard of anybody that suggested more than one antivirus. They will interfere with each other. One virus will pop up. Antivirus A tries to block it. It quarantines it. Antivirus B notices that the virus is on the computer but it doesn't know that the virus is being quarantined. So it quarantines the definitions of antivirus A. Antivirus A, notices what it deems suspicious behavior from antivirus B. Antivirus attempts to quarantine antivirus B. In the meanwhile, a virus comes into the computer, because neither antivirus are doing anything besides to each other.
In conclusion, multiple real-time protections, make computer less secure (gives user a false sense of additional security) and also makes computer tragically slow...
Well,there you have it, what might happen when you have two active antiviruses. It reduces the security.

Now, you can have an active real-time protection and an inactive antivirus, like a scanner, or online scanner, or removal tools.

Your concept is wrong. Antivirus A cannot scan the quarantine folder of Antivirus B as its locked.
Besides, Avast is certified to run alongside MSE without any issues. Infact, there are many such couples which runs side by side at a time without any issues.