Hello. I'm new here...I've read the instructions threads, so let's see if I can get this right.
I'm concerned that my computer may have a Nasty on it. When I first started using this computer (which was not new when I bought it), it had a 90-day trial version of McAfee on it. When the trial version expired, I wasn't in a position to do anything about it, and for the past few months my computer (it's a laptop, and I access the internet wirelessly) has been completely without any sort of protection.
Recently, a friend told me about Avast!, which they said was excellent and free. However, when I went to Google, searched for their website, and tried to click through to the site, boom: the browser window closed. No fireworks, no error message, nothing; it just shut down.
I reopened the browser window and tried again; same results. I opened a different browser (I usually use Firefox, so I tried IE); same thing. I tried typing the address directly into the location bar, accessing the website through a link on a friend's blog, and emailing myself the link and accessing it that way. The same thing always happens. The browser window closes down. It always starts right back up again, but when Firefox asks if i want to restore the page, it restores it to the last page I viewed before trying to click through to the Avast website.
Can anyone tell me what might be going on here? I tried a couple of different websites for free antivirus programs, and the same thing happened on one of them (I think it was Avira). It didn't happen on two other websites, but I wasn't really impressed by those two websites.