Panda or Pandora?

Hi all,

I was just going to let this slide and be a lesson to myself, but having
just talked with a person from Panda Software about the issue I had (he
called me, BTW,) I figured I would let people know that a major flaw
exists in the installation of this product.

I have been researching various antivirus solutions to hopefully replace
the existing antivirus package that my company uses. When installing
Panda's trial, it *uninstalled* my current antivirus solution. Don't
misinterpret this. It didn't *disable* the antivirus program, it removed
it from my hard drive. The only warning I received was a DOS (denial of
service) that the installation program generated so that Windows XP would
be forced to reboot.

The follow-up call that I received just minutes ago was to see what my
impression of Panda was. No apologies were given that the installer
uninstalled my previous antivirus program. In fact, the follow-up caller
wasn't even surprised that this had happened and stated that two antivirus
programs running on the same PC would most likely "hose your system."
It didn't matter that I had disabled the antivirus' service through the
control panel prior to installing Panda.

Well, my response to him is this news post. Hopefully anyone thinking of
installing this product will think twice before attempting to do so. It
wasn't my desire to bash Panda, but no apologies or anything??? That's
just bad business.

Kaspersky and Trend Micro, OTOH, seem to be quite nice packages. They
don't uninstall your existing antivirus software programs either.

Hopefully, Panda software developers will fix this bug.
--
Brian

Panda titanium is my first commercial av. I've used fprot.
It installed ok, telling me to uninstall any other av before
it installed. It found klez.i as a file with a *.zip.src.src or something
that had been sitting on the desktop for ages and was never double clicked.
(My brother's computer, I thought he wanted the file, thought it was a
source file of some type.)
I made the rescue disks. The rescue disks didn't work, so I got on Panda
site (the titanium was a CD I bought on internet) and downloaded titanium
2004, 18 megs, but I had just put up a cable modem. The titan2004.exe
(something like that) said that titanium had to be uninstalled before
installing 2004. Did that.
And made the rescue disks, that this time seemed to work.
Then the nightmares. Windows ME. Crashed, many 'caused a page fault,
couldn't find a file, blue screens of death, difficulty even booting in safe
mode. I uninstalled (safe mode) titan2004 (I almost called it tit2004, but
didn't want anyone getting excited.)
And I uninstalled Zone Alarm, now the computer runs ok (I had turned off
system restore months ago when removing Klez.e I think it was.)
I re-installed Zone Alarm, still ran ok. I then re-installed titanium.
That's where it is now, everything seems to be ok, and scans are clear.
Summary. Stay away from Titanium 2004 downloaded from Pandasoftware.com
(Oh, yes, I registered the titanium before I could download 2004.)
Regards Russg
<Brian> wrote in message news:107bk7dar8u9n6e@corp.supernews.com...
> Hi all,
>
> I was just going to let this slide and be a lesson to myself, but having
> just talked with a person from Panda Software about the issue I had (he
> called me, BTW,) I figured I would let people know that a major flaw
> exists in the installation of this product.
>
> I have been researching various antivirus solutions to hopefully replace
> the existing antivirus package that my company uses. When installing
> Panda's trial, it *uninstalled* my current antivirus solution. Don't
> misinterpret this. It didn't *disable* the antivirus program, it removed
> it from my hard drive. The only warning I received was a DOS (denial of
> service) that the installation program generated so that Windows XP would
> be forced to reboot.
>
> The follow-up call that I received just minutes ago was to see what my
> impression of Panda was. No apologies were given that the installer
> uninstalled my previous antivirus program. In fact, the follow-up caller
> wasn't even surprised that this had happened and stated that two antivirus
> programs running on the same PC would most likely "hose your system."
> It didn't matter that I had disabled the antivirus' service through the
> control panel prior to installing Panda.
>
> Well, my response to him is this news post. Hopefully anyone thinking of
> installing this product will think twice before attempting to do so. It
> wasn't my desire to bash Panda, but no apologies or anything??? That's
> just bad business.
>
> Kaspersky and Trend Micro, OTOH, seem to be quite nice packages. They
> don't uninstall your existing antivirus software programs either.
>
> Hopefully, Panda software developers will fix this bug.
> --
> Brian
>
>