replacement for Comodo CIS

Hello,

I have been a paying Comodo CIS customer for many years but I have stated looking for alternatives. The software has deteriorated significantly since 2012 and I find the more recent versions to be unusable. There is a never ending series of issues with updating the AV database, the redesigned interface is useless, and my computer is so slow and locks up so often that it's not even close to being manageable. I can renew my license for the 2012 version, but I thought I should start looking at alternatives.

One feature I liked about the pre 2013 versions of CIS were the Defense+ feature that white-lists program execution. If the digital signature of an application is not in the approved list, the program runs in a sandbox unless it is added to trusted files. I think this is one of the best approaches to protect against 0 day threats. I also liked the firewall which I also have set to white list. All programs are by default not allowed to connect to the internet but it was not too hard to set up rules to allow connections to specific domains. It is important that rules can be configured by domain. It was also nice in the pre 2013 CIS that you could look at all your current active connections with one click and terminate any connection with a second click. This was done away with for reasons that defy explanation. I guess the CIS AV worked fine, but I never had a detection alert from so it's hard to say.

One thing that would be very useful would be the ability to exclude directories and files from both AV scan and execution prevention. I am a developer and CIS could be very hard to work with when creating new software. Every newly compiled application would trigger the D+ since the digital signature had changed. I also have backup directories with TB of old data and this does not need to be scanned by the AV. I like applications that let you know what they are doing. There were allot of times when CIS would ramp up the CPU usage for a considerable length of time and there was no explanation of what it was doing. My worst infection ever was an infection to the Norton updater, so I don't like security software that is constantly doing tasks in the background. If a background task is running, the user should be able to see what is going on and have the option to quit the task. I guess such options should be password protected.

Suggestions would be appreciated, I haven't looked at this stuff in a while. I guess this is the best forum to post in but please feel free to move it elsewhere if it isn't.

LMHmedchem