? on anti virus and malware protection

just installed Avira anti virus freeware. looking at malware, ie: spyware blaster and Iobit malware fighter. are they compatible with each other or will they create conflicts. my op windows xp,sp3. I have turned off the windows firewall as it will almost always block . any advice welcom

 

I ran Avira and SpywareBlaster on several 2k and XP computers with no problem. Before you run MalwareFighter, you might want to search here. Several threads reported problems with it.

I can tell you that I run malwarebytes (free on some computers, paid on others) and have no problem running it with SpywareBlaster, Avira and now MS Security Essentials (I dumped Avira) on XP and Win 7 computers.

 

Jim, short answer is Avira and Iobit might conflict with each other. Check out Major Attitude's guide for help:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=25834

Both of these feature realtime guard processes, which might interfere with each other. Iobit is easier to turn off than Avira. So, you may want to run Avira for its realtime guard, and use IOBIT for periodic scanning, but not at the same time as another scanner.

Spyware Blaster isn't the same kind of program as the other two. It essentially builds a list of bad software and sites for your browser to avoid.
Recent Avira version default is controlling access to the hosts file more than it used to, so Spyware Blaster updates may not fully take without turning off
the Avira control until the the update finishes. This also applies to the Spy Bot Immunization updates as well.

Firewall off?! Not good. Windows Firewall isn't too great, since it doesn't block outgoing on XP. Changes were made for Vista and Win7. If it is almost always blocking, as you say, you might want to deal with it in a separate thread, or check out some of the others, which Tim lists in the above guide.

Hope this helps and good luck:wave