My thoughts about NOD32 AV v3 and an imported Vista UAC problem

Hello,

I just installed ESET NOD32 Antivirus v3 RC1 on my notebook, running Windows Vista Ultimate, 32-bit. There are many things I noticed, let’s start with the beginning, the installation:

I downloaded the MSI file from www.nod32.com/beta as a standard user. I started the MSI file as user and answered all the configuration dialogs. Now, setup has all the required information and is ready to start, an UAC prompt launched.

I answered the prompt and here is the first problem: Another UAC prompt popped up. I think the second one came from the uninstaller, because I’d NOD32 v2 installed, while running the setup of NOD32 v3 AV. I suggest to start uninstall from the elevated MSI process. There is no need for a second elevation.

When setup has finished, I got a reboot prompt. But I also noticed that NOD32 v3 launched. That’s a bad user experience I think, because I asked myself: Is a reboot really required? Why does the newly installed software, which says from itself it requires a reboot starts up? Well, the GUI shows up a message, that a reboot is required, but as I said before, this is a bad experience I think. You shouldn’t launch the application, when there is an outstanding reboot.

Now I rebooted my machine and logged myself in as a normal standard user like before. And here comes the biggest error:
I launched the NOD32 Antivirus user interface and tried to configure the software – but I can’t. Why can’t I? It is because the user interface isn’t elevated. What I have to do? Fire up taskmanager, kill the egui.exe process and launch it as administrator. Outch. That’s really bad.

Guys come on – you said you have completely rewritten NOD32 v3. So why don’t you uses the new feature from Windows Vista like the feature to elevate the user rights, when needed? Things changed in Vista, everyone is a standard user with least privileges. Actual, a standard user isn’t able to configure your software. That’s a really bad experience. I hope that will break your “Vista ready” certification. Please read http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa906021.aspx and http://buildingsecurecode.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-to-display-uac-shield-icon-inside.html and http://codefromthe70s.org/vistatutorial.asp

Another problem I noticed is the progress bar. I selected a 1.7gb file (sfx archiv) for scanning (World In Conflict MP demo). A progress window popped up, but I didn’t see any status information. After some minutes, I canceled the scan – now I see a status in the on demand scan details - ~850 objects got scanned.