Dude, do you seriously have a clue what you are talking about? I do a lot of PC repairs, and Avast is one of the best AV's out there in my opinion. If someone does not have AV installed and they are a home user, I load that for them and get hardly any complaints. If I ever remove viruses/spyware, I do 4 scans, the 4th being avast, and it usually finds things other apps leave. Give Avast a try before you knock it. It's a solid app with good features, and very light. I have been running it a while on my own system at home and haven't had any major infections. I've seen people have it 6 months out of date and it still protected their pc's well enough to only need a quick cleanup b/c they'd been looking at questionable sites.
Also, I believe the CEO at Alwil Software(who makes Avast) used to be a Marketing Director for Symantec. Seems like it was on a blog or something a while back.