On 03 Apr 2014, Char Jackson wrote in
alt.windows7.general:

I've been using Avira on multiple computers for quite a few years
now and haven't found the advertising to be painful at all. Every
4-6 months a small rectangular ad appears in the lower right
corner of the desktop. I click 'Delete all' and it's gone for
another 4-6 months. That's pretty painless.

I just checked my notes to remind me. Avira Free was OK for a long
time, but a year or two ago they started throwing up a big obnoxious ad
every time the virus definitions were updated, which was several times
a day sometimes. For a while, there were a couple of workarounds to
mitigate that, but then they stopped working. That's when I moved to
Avast.