AVG makes me sad

I just attempted download of the Eclipse IDE for the Android SDK within Firefox. (*This in itself is somewhat exciting, since now I'll be able to finally work on some Android app development.)

Since I'm tethered through my phone and knew it would be awhile, I decided to try to open a zip file containing something AVG decided to invalidly recognize as trojan/malware. (Telling it to ignore still wouldn't allow me to open the file, and turning off .zip file parsing in advanced properties still didn't do the trick.)

After some research, I determined this was an issue with the MS Office AVG plugin. Simple enough, I just find it and disable it somehow, right? 

I guess AVG Free v. 9 has a paradigm inability to disable MS Office Plugins.

I tried through command prompt, but I guess this syntax string is a bit out of date. Oh well. 

So, I decide to try the Control Panel --- > Programs and Features route. Unfortunately the only option is a complete uninstall, which I really want to avoid since uninstalling ANY antivirus suite can be quite a chore.

I go exploring.

Eventually I come across the setup.exe file in its native folder. I open it, and immediately AVG hijacks my browser and decides to shut everything down without authorization or advanced notice. NOOOOO! Don't cancel my Eclipse download!!!!! It's only been a couple of hours now... :*(

Just like that, it's gone... Firefox's attempt to recover via the download manager just starts the whole thing over again. Great!!! Not much I can do right now, I'm in the middle of trying to fix this new issue with AVG. So I'll just fix this AVG thing real quick, then restart my download in a minute... or 45.

Back to the matter at hand. Continuing with the process, I'm now looking at an add/remove feature dialogue within the installer which gives me a few more options of disabling specific plugins, and bingo: there it is ---> uncheck MS Office AVG plugin. Good. Hopefully it's just "next/yes/OK" from here on out.

Not so fast. 

I get a prompt that says "choose a package/installer" with no particular other instructions than a pop-up requesting a .dat file extension. So I browse to said AVG9 folder, find it, and get an error dialogue, "file package file open failed, HResult 0x80004005."  I suppose this is because when I actually browse for the file in the pop-up, and TRY to select ANY file whatsoever, it still leaves the text box path blank upon returning to the installer once the browse window is closed. So I just type the path in the box, right?

Wrong again. Still, I get an error, somewhat different : "File package file open failed. Invalid header id."

In the AVG forums it was suggested that this may be a registry issue with the AVG install itself and should be resolved through a full repair via the setup. Attempting to repair results in the same thing, request for the package/installer .dat file and another dead end. This resulted in me finally having to temporarily uninstall AVG (overkill, much?) just to open this one little zip file I've been trying to open for the past hour.

While this is uninstalling, back to Eclipse. Instead of trying the alternate download link for the Amazon cloud, this time I think Bittorrent might be slightly faster. Luckily since my download folder for Firefox is directed to the same download folder as uTorrent, it detects the partial file so I don't have to wait for it to re-download again. WOOHOO!!! I guess this process never occurred to me for some reason. It's the simple things in life that can completely make your day... (either that or being so blond underneath that I'm just now realizing that's what Bittorrent is really all about.)

 Moral of the story:

I could imagine this being a multiple phonecall issue spanning several hours (and transfers) through numerous parties within the tech support realm.  I don't know what I would do if I were just another end-user. Fingers would be pointed, people would be blamed, and still, nothing would have been accomplished... but at least I can sleep tonight knowing I've tried everything within the power of most any other support analysts barring a phone call and an open case to AVG's software engineers/product developers. Doesn't seem like they're jumping on it though since so many others are reporting this problem... then again, who am I to complain about freeware? I guess it's the fact that I've been an avid user/supporter of AVG since 2003 and I've noticed (until recently) it's been completely stellar and virtually free of requiring user input beyond initial installation and what used to be the frequent update notifications (almost daily) which have now turned to "only if I look for them" or I've somehow prompted it by playing around inside the application once in awhile. Not saying I won't reinstall it, I'm just pretty disappointed since I've endorsed this product by suggesting it to other users over the years who I know are autonomously incapable of providing basic support for their own systems.