Well, one of currently the two most popular, most bought and positively-reviewed AV's on Amazon is Norton. The other is Kaspersky! Which I'm looking forward to replacing my McAfee with (which I admit, is bloatware to a degree and not to mention the constant shortcut-making solution by McAfee THEMSELVES does NOT work. Screw this.). I've tried Kaspersky out on a relative's almost-identical system to mine, and man, it was awesome. With Russia, you get power.
One thing lolworthy though is the praising of Avast. Like almost all free AV's it sucks unless you're not into downloading different sorts of media. "Torrenting" also falls in that category. Not as bad as AVG from personal experience, but both have failed to catch viruses before on my XP system. They were also up-to-date at the time, and I remember someone making a thread about it on some site - I forget its name and I haven't gone to it since like 2009 I think, and some expert member telling him whether it's Avast, AVG free or Symantec free trial, you get what you pay for. They're not as built and providing as much security as one would have with a paid AV, just generally speaking. I think currently the most reliable free AV is MSE though, but I could be wrong. It just always seemed promising to me and I've never had problems with it, when I used it.
So, I may try this method to remove the desktop shortcuts again. Doubt it'll change jack though.
