Re: AVG 8.5 Warning (Asus)
I've had similar issues with AVG in the past. With some PCs I've build, because the customers were using them for home use and they didn't want to spend more on commercial software I installed AVG on them. But it caused a BSOD after I had updated all the system drivers and the AVG database. After some investigation I discovered it was a conflict between ASUS motherboard drivers and AVG. Uninstalling the motherboard drivers allowed AVG to run perfectly, but reinstalling them caused the BSOD. I therefore removed AVG and installed a different free alternative. That was under XP SP2. Not sure if similar occurs with Vista.
These days I highly recommend Comodo Security suite as the best free Virus and Firewall solution. It has a small footprint, installs quickly, remains fairly quiet in the background, updates itself quietly and just informs you when an update has happened. It seems to catch malware, virus infections and firewall related breaches well. About the only annoying thing it does is with its heuristics virus scanning because it will often keep flagging the same file over and over again, every time you open its directory, even if you say to ignore it, until you designate the directory as safe and not to be scanned. It definitely hates cracks!
But that is the only fault I've found to date.
However on my main PC I run Kaspersky 2009 and it is in my opinion the best commercial virus checker on the market at the moment. It's virus definitions and database get updates sometimes a few times in one hour. This keeps each update very small, but in turn completely up to date. It means that Kaspersky should always be up to date to within 1 hour of any new threats being discovered in the wild.
Specifically for firewalls I'm not as clear cut on what I would completely recommend. Generally for home use I use Comodo as it seems to work well, but for proper security that is robust I don't honestly think any of the current software solutions for firewalls do a perfect job. I used to really like Outpost Pro, but it got bloated and over complex in its last version release. It still did a great job, but was over complex. The best option is always a dedicated hardware firewall, but they can be very expensive and overkill for home users. You could of course always use an old PC as a firewall with the Linux based firewall software Smoothwall installed.
http://www.smoothwall.org/