AVG anyone?

I installed the latest version of K-Lite today, Dec 20th, and found myself lumbered with AVG as my search engine for both Chrome and IE 11. For some reason I only saw the opt-out window after the installation finished. It took me a good 20 minutes, including one registry edit, before I was finally rid of it.

Yes, Chrome sets Google as its default search engine and IE Bing, but changing them if you want to is child's play. Obviously, AVG have little confidence in their search engine if they force it on people and then make changes in the registry to prevent it from being changed back. Do they imagine the emotions evoked in people trying to break their grip on their browsers (annoyance, anger etc) are somehow favourable to them? It makes me determined never to have anything to do with AVG in the future. But the question here is, why are you in bed with these people? What good does it do your reputation to support an outfit that forces unasked for changes to people's browsers and renders them a pain to reverse? I have been using K-Lite for years and I have never had a complaint until now.

Further to my email yesterday, it turns out I spoke too soon--there were many more entries strewn about the registry, and an executive file vprot.exe, which I spent some time trying to delete, and then finally gave up and reinstalled a disk image from before this debacle, which is something I don't like doing because it means a lot of writes to my SSD.

Bottom line -- can you please give a guarantee that future updates to K-Lite will provide an opt-out to installing AVG *before* the installation begins?

wapanap wrote:What good does it do your reputation to support an outfit that forces unasked for changes to people's browsers and renders them a pain to reverse?

It is not forced. I just installed 10.2.0 on my wife's computer. On the last window before you clicked "Install" were the options to uncheck all the AVG stuff.

The offer is clearly shown during installation, and can be disabled with a single mouse click. It is shown after the speaker configuration page, and before "ready to install" page. You must have accidentally clicked "Next" twice if you did not see it.

The AVG software can be uninstalled through the Windows Control Panel, just like any other software.

Admin wrote:The offer is clearly shown during installation, and can be disabled with a single mouse click. It is shown after the speaker configuration page, and before "ready to install" page. You must have accidentally clicked "Next" twice if you did not see it.

The AVG software can be uninstalled through the Windows Control Panel, just like any other software.

I didn't see the offer screen until after the installation. Windows has a habit sometimes of opening the window you want to see behind other windows, and I guess this is what happened to me on this occasion. However, whether or not it was partly my fault, it has certainly been an education into just how tenacious unwanted software can be. Parts of it can be uninstalled through the Windows Control Panel--obviously that was the first thing I tried--but the changes it makes to browsers cannot be dealt with via the Control Panel, and it leaves scores of entries scattered through the registry, some of which reconstitute themselves after being deleted. I just cannot see the point in making itself so difficult to get rid of.