When a virus isn't a virus

First - if this belongs in the lounge area - please move it there. Thanks in advance!

The people here at Major Geeks know I am no stranger to this forum. They have had to help me several times and I am extremely grateful for their help. They are very smart when it comes to dealing with the problems of viruses, malware, and the like. My problem is that I like to try new software. I usually download it from here or Bleeping Computers because I know both sites test their software out throughly before just saying "Hey! Here's a new piece of software to use!"

Last year I became infected with some nasty critter and things became so bad that I couldn't even get on to the internet to ask for help. I'm a software developer and my 500GB disk drive is full of compilers, editors, and other software to help me do my work. So it was with great reluctance that I decided to wipe out my hard drive and completely re-install the Operating System as well as all of the software. I say reluctantly because it would take me about a month to restore the system back to like it was.

So I backed up the system to a ZIP file (which took two days), wiped the hard drive, and started the re-installation. After almost a week I hit the install that had the virus in it. It quickly took over my system so I wrote down which installer it was, wiped the hard drive (even doing a low level reformat to ensure everything was gone) and started over. Rinse-and repeat two more times. Finally I had all of the antivirus software, anti-malware software, and the like installed and I had sent off copies of the infected files to Avira (the anti-virus software company) and had received a small program to take the viruses out of the installers. Ran the program, did the installs, everything worked. My system ran so much faster than I had been used to that I was really overjoyed to have it doing so.

That is how things were up until two days ago. Two days ago I downloaded and installed program to test it out for a client. That was when my system began to run sluggishly. It would run for a few minutes and then stop. The cursor would hang and not move for about a minute and then start moving again. Trying to run anything took five or six minutes. Virus?

No. Not a virus. Which is why I entitled this post the way I did. It turns out that Comodo (the firewall program I use) for unknown reasons now has something called "Viruscope". It basically is an anti-virus program and might have been there all along but I do not remember it being there when I installed Comodo. Anyway - it somehow got turned on two days ago and it began fighting with Avira which, as any of the very nice people here will tell you - you can't have two anti-virus programs running at the same time. What you get is exactly what I experienced.

So the morale of this story is - always check your software to make sure you don't have two antivirus programs running on your system when this type of symptom begins to show up.

To everyone here at MajorGeeks I want to thank you again for being there when I had my problems. Everything is fine with my system (at least as far as I can tell). And Malwarebytes shows zero infections as does Avira.