Ron, I think MS got dragged into providing an AV solution because what's out there now really doesn't work all that well. Oh sure, there are lots of security suites that run and do a fairly decent job of protecting a computer if the surfer doesn't visit a bunch of crap sites (and is just plain lucky in some instances). They all extract a toll though; slow computer performance and glitches with other software, to name just a couple. A few months ago, I removed all the non-MS protective software from my rather common laptop, because I thought it was just too slow booting up. The difference was very dramatic on boot-up time. Took about 20 seconds from the time the BIOS screen flashed, until I had the Vista login screen. When I installed the MS AV, it increased that time by about 10 seconds so now it takes about half a minute to go from 'on' to the login screen. Times reported are with Windows Firewall, Windows Defender, and MS Security running.

Last night, I removed Panda and installed the same MS stuff on my office desktop. Noticed similar performance boost and email & browser open much quicker and for some reason, the weather RADAR animations from WU are much faster too.

Whether it is actually protecting anything, remains to be seen but I sure have a much nicer computer to run now.