Is Anyone Aware Of A free Antivirus That Won't Kill The Office 2010?

I have a client running Win 7 64-bit with MS Office 2010 home & Student.

It appears that installing Avast Free killed the product activation, blanked out device manager, and prevented Office from being activated after a clean re-install.

A similar thread about how to fix it is here: Office 2010 - Unlicensed product after installing Norton 360

I've run Avast on several machines (In part because of the built-in remote assistance tool) with no issues.

I need to find a solid antivirus program for Office 2010 users. Anyone aware of something better than MSE for these folk? (And no, they don't want to switch to Open Office)

Thank you in advance,

Dan

I've been using Avast free for many years with Office 2010 Pro and never had this problem.
I use only the basic 3 shields protection, none of the Avast optional "bloat/features", so i can't comment how any of that works.

Just had a new desktop computer built and the techie installed the free "Avira" AV which he swears by. Used it for years without a single glitch. Cheers daved93

Fireberd - thank you. I'm aware of Microsoft Security Essentials, but according to a couple of articles I've read, it's not particularly good at stopping viruses in real-time. That's kind of a last resort for me. I don't know if I can link articles from another site in here according to the forum rules, but it was PC Magazine's "Best Free Antivirus 2015" article in particular that rated MSE poorly, if I remember correctly.

David E - thank you. This is a Win 7 Home Premium OS (64-bit) and MS Office Home & Student 2010 rig. We hadn't run anything so far except Avast Free, but I do use it for boot-time scan occasionally because it's good to scan the machine before the OS and all the drivers start. I also use it for the remote assistance tool built-in in order to give my clients help at a distance. In this particular case I was planning on using it for that because the client lives an hour away and I was going to build a Wordpress site for them and teach them how to run it. I may well have lost the client over this issue, and the only place I've ever heard of it was after-the-fact as the very last post in the article linked above. I personally have been using Avast free for a couple of months without incident, and my son has been running it for a few years.

Daved93 - thank you. I haven't heard of Avira. I'll have to look it up. It's not been in any of the review articles I've read.

All-in-all, I think I've just gotten bit by a not-so-common combination of Avast, Win 7 HP, and Office H&S 2010.

Regards,

Dan

I use TeamViewer for remote assistance
https://www.teamviewer.com/en/index.aspx

Then you're not tied to a specific AV for helping remotely.
They also have a QuickSupport (portable) version so you can have someone download that and run it so you can connect.

DavidE: Thank you. I also just found out about Chrome Remote Desktop from Google: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...enigjmpp?hl=en

You're welcome.
I haven't used that, hope it works well for you.
:)

I have been using the free version of Panda for more than a year and it works just fine.

I have Panda free on one of my systems and really like it, it's quiet, light on resources, and no conflicts.

The only problem i've found is,
I setup a scheduled scan in the Panda GUI and that creates a Windows Scheduled Task to run the task.
The scheduled scan has the Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed is unchecked, and it is disabled. So i can't change that setting.

Does anyone know how to force Panda (free) to run missed scheduled scans ?