aol question regarding AV & security

No! Not really! It depends on which ones and which featues you enable. Using multiple full blown scanner/blocking/removal tools like MS Antispyware, Ewido, Spy Sweeper, Pest Patrol, Spyware Doctor, CounterSpy, etc can cause massive resource drain and can bring your CPU to its knees. And they can conflict with each other similar to antivirus applications. This conflict can make it difficult to impossible for one tool to fix a problem since the other tools may block the changes. Running several tools as a temporarily while cleaning problems is okay (short term). But you should use only one long term. Disabling is not sufficient, the extras must be uninstalled.

Using only Ad-Aware as a scanner (the free version) and Spybot without Teatimer, and Spyware Blaster are all find even with one (only one) of the previously mentioned full blown tools.

 

It does not matter if they are running or not! The eat up system resources. Even it you try to disable the active protection, they are still running. They have services running too.

They should not even be installed all at the same time except for short intervals while trying to fix malware and even then they cause us grief sometimes. But as soon as we are done using them to fix a certain problem, we uninstall all but one.

Ad-Aware SE (free version) and Spybot (without Teatimer) are not problems since they only use resources when you run them. Neither is SpywareBlaster. All three of these can always be on a PC.