Greetings again,
Sorry for the long delay in replying. Mom suffered a non-trivial stroke, and I've been trying to figure out how her care and living arrangements go forward from here (she's a widow and I'm the only child, so I get this responsibility all to myself...). She has improved a bit, and that gives me a brief chance to do some of the things I would otherwise be doing now. Today, that means trying to sort out Vista and avast! Besides, I need a different problem to focus on after a week of talking to doctors about Mom's.
It's not just (manually) updating that gives me the prompt. Since my avast! is at this time the free edition, I have to start the main program to run a scan. And I get the prompt every time I open the program's UI, even before I actually start the scan. Moreover, though it is not good security policy to do so, I am running as an administrator (though I don't understand Vista well enough yet to know whether that also makes me THE administrator, if that distinction is valid).
I agree that disabling UAC is probably the best option at this point, but it bugs me that this goofy UAC is so invasive that, ironically, disabling it to conveniently run a well-established security program seems to be the most viable option. Surely a company like Microsoft should be able to allow in a straightforward way enough elevation of privilege that a mainstream virus scanner can at least run its main UI without having to explicitly allow it every time. Apparently it possible to do so since KAV can do it, but it is obviously not a simple thing to do since so many other security apps seem to have their own issues with this new "feature". I don't even want to think about trying a third-party firewall, for example, even though Vista's inbuilt firewall has its own significant weaknesses.
Time to get some overdue rest, I think... I detect that I'm close to not making any sense when I say things.
Thanks again for your input.
Crashman
