Bitdefender online scanner problem

I've used Bitdefender's online scanner in the past, and I've found it a bit fussy with IE settings (for example, I have always had to turn off the popup blocker and set the security from my usual medium-high level to medium).

It's been quite a few months since I used Bitdefender. I went to the site today here:

http://www.bitdefender.com/scanner/online/free.html

I did not disable the popup blocker this time, but a popup still opened when I clicked on 'scan now', so I thought maybe this time it would be OK. I went through their prompts to download and install the active x control. When the time came to run it, however, I receive an error message that says this website is not authorized to run this active x control. I'm using IE7. I changed the security to medium, closed the browser, and reopened it and ran through the whole thing again. Same problem.

Their troubleshooting section says to change the IE security to 'default'. I notice that in the IE Tools-Security section, the button for 'default' is greyed out, but there is one below that that says to reset all zones to default level. I don't recall having tinkered with IE's security settings, ever. I think it was set to 'medium high' right out of the box. That being said, though, in case I did custom set something somewhere that I don't remember, I would like to avoid setting it to default if I don't have to, since I don't really know what changes that is going to make (so I can reverse them when the scan is done.) I also do not want to follow their suggestion to place certain things in the trusted zone. I don't have anything in the trusted zone.

Is anyone else having this problem with this website? I haven't tried it on my laptop yet, only the desktop.

I don't use IE for anything other than Windows updates and this scanner.

OK, having the same problem with the laptop as well. There was a .dll that wanted to install that said it was older than the one already on my hard drive, did I want to overwrite it. I chose yes for both the laptop and the desktop. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not.

 

Solved! Had to uninstall and reinstall. There's a button on the IE browser to uninstall, so I did that and tried again, worked this time. Maybe because I hadn't used it for so many months, something from the old stuff wasn't playing nice with the new stuff. (How's that for technical jargon? )

 

Spoke too soon! Now I get the virus definitions up to 99% downloaded, and then an error message comes up saying that the update failed.

I did disable my AVG free 8.5 resident shield.

You know, as much as I like the Bitdefender online scanner and have felt it was trustworthy, I have found over the years that I have a lot of problems actually getting it to work correctly. When it does so, it's great, and I like that you can set it to 'report only' in case you get a false positive, although once it did magically change itself back to its default setting of auto clean and it removed an innocent .exe (I had a backup on external media, fortunately). It was a real nightmare when I was using ZASS, forcing me to run through a list of about 10 or 12 steps before Bitdefender would actually run, but I've used it since removing ZASS a couple of years ago and it has worked. And now we're back to this. :banghead

Oh, once I clicked on the Tools button in the IE browser to uninstall the Bitdefender scanner, using the scanner again did not put a button back in the browser this time.

I ran Kaspersky's online scanner last night, maybe I should just be happy with that as a backup.