the new AVG8 is causing lots of people to jump ship over to AVAST free. IT is finding a lot of false positives and as stated it is picking up parts of spybot S&D as infections as well as some other good programs such as spywareblaster. Over on dslreports there are numerous threads about how unhappy people are with AVG8. IT apparently is also on many pcs causing the cpu usage to go up to 100% almost all the time which is not good. Many of the people over there are going to AVAST free for now. Many that did not move to AVG8 yet are staying with the older version of AVG till it's end date. here are a few of the threads from dslreports if you want to see them. AVG8 thread within this one is a link to another one plus this one with a poll AVG8 thread It just looks like they let AVG8 out a bit too early yet for the general population, need to work some of the bugs out still. And they definitely should have made those extras turned off at default and only available if people chose them.

Can't you right click the AVG icon and Quit Control Center. That should turn off AVG. I don't see how ACDsee could get a trojan, since it is only a photo manager, but I guess anything is possible, they can come in through a backdoor without a program being opened. I would go to the Virus Vault in AVG and delete or remove the trojan, then it will be gone. Then see if ACDsee still works.

there is a bit of a problem but AVG announced it was going to put out an update with a fix, not sure if it has done that yet. AVG was finding a part of spywareblaster that it was alerting to as a trojan when in fact it was not, it was an actual part of spywareblaster. Other than the false positives I don't know of any other problems. I would never get rid of spywareblaster myself it does what many do not it immunizes your browsers silently, the only draw back is that you do have to remember to open it weekly and update it then enable all the new protection. here is a link to an article about the AVG spywareblaster issue Attention AVG and SpywareBlaster Users

from AVG faq: How to install AVG without LinkScanner If you wish to install AVG 8.0 Free Edition without the LinkScanner component, or uninstall this component from your program, please proceed as follows: * Download the AVG 8.0 Free Edition installation package from our website. * Run the installation with the parameters /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch. One way to achieve this is to: o save the AVG Free installation file directly to disk C:\ o open menu Start -> Run o type c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch * The installation will be started, and AVG will be installed without the LinkScanner component. To add or remove some AVG Free components, such as e-mail scanner plugins, please proceed as follows: * please download the latest AVG installation installation file from the Download section of our website * When you are prompted, please do not open this file directly from the Internet, but click the "Save" button and choose a location where the installation file should be stored. We recommend saving the file to the Desktop. * Locate the downloaded AVG installation file (it has a four color square icon and its name starts with AVG...) and launch the installation by double-clicking on it. * The installation process recognizes the existence of installed AVG and the Add/Remove Components option is offered. Reinstalling and using the Add/Remove Components option is necessary for example in the case that there is a new supported e-mail client (MS Outlook/The Bat!) installed on the PC after the first installation of AVG Free. And be sure you go to your browser add-on area and disabled the AVG 8.0 Web toolbar and anything else related to AVG. Go to this faq for more info AVG faq