Exactly David, you're 100% right !!!
This is totally unnecessary... why should they bother checking on antiviruses on our computers in the first place. That shouldn't be firewall's business at all. We have our Security Center that is provided by our OS, Windows... and if it says, antivirus is present, and clearly recognizes it as avast!, then no one should worry. Yet again... ZA says you don't have antivirus installed on your system... avast! is very respectable antivirus, and when some fresh users see ZoneAlarm doesn't recognize avast!, first thing that will pop up in their mind, is: "
...what the heck... this is not quite good antivirus... it's not recognized by one of the best firewalls out there...". Not quite fair from ZoneLabs IMHO...
Even if checking on installed antivirus program from withing ZoneAlarm is good idea, they should rephrase everything... something like,
antivirus installed, antivirus name: avast! antivirus... our recommendation: ZA antivirus ...even that sounds better, but not saying, there is no antivirus at all...
I'm using ZA, but this "marketing move" is nothing but unnecessary move by ZoneLabs.
My advice to our friend
comRace: Go to ZoneAlarm ANTIVIRUS MONITORING section and disable antivirus checking. You need a firewall, ad you don't need their opinion is your antivirus good, bad, recognized by ZoneLabs or not... if you need user's opinion how good this antivirus is, just read all those nice reviews all over the internet, visit this forum, ask for help, and you'll see right away how good this product really is... Alwil Software is diligent and very hard working team consisted of wonderful people which also are our great friends... updates are on daily, and very often on hourly basis... Program updates are great, and best of all, they really know what they are doing, they are great bunch of programmers, but still, they ask us (forum members, visitors and beta testers) what can they do to improve their product. Same story every single time prior to releasing new program update... Best of all, they listen to our ideas (of course if they are reasonable enough)...
Technical support is practically 24/7, by e-mail, phone and through these forums... even for freeware product... hard to find something like that somewhere else. We all recognize Alwil's hard work, so why shouldn't ZoneLabs too ?
Cheers !