you may be running avg 7.5 free edition. if so you'll have recently been confronted with frequent 'AVG Free Notification' popup prompts to 'upgrade' by paying for the new 8.0 paid version.
they pulled a similar stunt with the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.5, with popups that advertised the paid 7.5 version and mentioned the free 7.5 one in small writing. this time there's no link to the free one, but it does still exist. after some fighting with the avg website, here it is:
http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afewhen you install the new free 8.0 version it will reset all your settings to the defaults, so you'll need to go through and turn off all the notifications for things like email scanning, unless you liked them for peace of mind value.
you'll also need to tell programs like msn the location of the new file scanner. for msn that in Tools > File Transfer, and the new scanner location should be "C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8\avgemc.exe" - unless you changed it, in which case you're just looking for a file called avgemc.exe.
a slightly annoying new feature in 8.0 is something called 'link scanner' which adds little icons against all your search results in google, yahoo etc, kindly notifying you that each link is safe (unless deemed otherwise). for me this is pretty pointless as most search engines do security tests anyway - i know google notifies you of potentially dangerous sites.
unfortunately if you disable link scanner in avg, it displays a generic security error that you're not fully protected blah blah. to get around this, you can leave it on in avg but just disable it in the web browser. hopefully you're all using firefox, in which case go to Tools > Add-ons and on 'AVG Safe Search' just click Disable.
