Here's the deal, there are two DISTINCT classes of traditional AV software. One generally sucks, the other does not. First: free AV, generally marketed to the

Here's the deal, there are two DISTINCT classes of traditional AV software. One generally sucks, the other does not. First: free AV, generally marketed to the individual or small business. If it's free, they are making money somehow; you are almost never getting it for free out of the goodness of the vendor's heart. Most of this stuff is crap, introduces ridiculous vulnerabilities in lots of instances, and can wreak havoc on totally clean machines. For this class of AV, I 100% agree with OP; kill it with fire (aside from maybe malwarebytes). Second: paid AV products targeted towards large businesses and the enterprise. Some of them still suck, but a lot of them are pretty good, and responsible + low impact in general. We have ESET deployed to ~700 machines and have yet to have a SINGLE problem caused by the AV while I've been here. Some of those are workstations, but a huge number are servers (granted, they get a special kind of av, not the full suite of web protection and everything). That said, traditional AV is becoming more and more useless every month and is starting to do very little aside from catch browser toolbars, random adware, and if you don't have a firewall it can sometimes help block known bad websites (at a cost). We have also had a fair number of instances where malicious crap made it past MULTIPLE layers of email security and was caught by AV on a workstation. Malware is not distributed such that every payload has consistent content/file-hash anymore, the alternative products out there that have a chance at pseudo-reliably catching real malicious stuff are neither free, cheap, or realistically going to be deployed outside of medium to large companies.