ESS/NOD32 replacement products

I am responsible for a 1,000 seat ESS/NOD32 environment. We had a hell of a time making the transition from v2.7 to v3 products last year (and I took some serious shots for it), but I was inclined to cut ESET some slack for several reasons, not the least of which was the vast increase on complexity of the new version over the old. IMO, with v3, ESS and NOD32 added a lot of function that potentially constitutes a great improvement, if and only if it is adequately tested and debugged, which obviously did not happen before the release of v3 and evidently still has not happened. I have until December 2010 to make a decision on renewal, and based on what I see here regarding difficulties with v4, and the continued lack of urgency from ESET to remedy those difficulties (especially EasternOkie's lock-up thread), I am inclined to move on. It appears that ESET has learned little about premature releases and certainly has not made any improvement in their tech support for same since the debut of v3. Not to mention that this is a product running on a standard hw reference platform (x86) under a quasi-standard OS - there is no acceptable excuse for differences in success or failure on different examples of platforms that meet those standards (as suggested in that thread). My suspicion is that a lot of these difficulties are related to the "WAN miniport" emulated device and related sandbox testing that I believe was introduced with v3, but it isn't my place to identify or correct these issues.

To come to the point: I am hoping to get some advice here about what products might best replace it. I'm going to make meeting that request much more difficult by announcing that I will not consider CA, NA, or Norton products (ESET is "the devil I know" at the moment, and I have had equally bad or worse experiences with those other vendors in the past). I would like to find a product that has an integrated FW (that can be disabled) like ESS, but at this point, I wouldn't insist on it. For a bit over a year we have been using MalwareBytes as a backstop product to ESET, and it has worked very well in that role. However, that is a much lower bar than is set for a full-time real-time AV product. Any experience with MB as a primary AV (which I am aware does not have the FW)?

If this needs to be posted in a different topic, I trust that a Wilder's admini will move it for me, rather than deleting it and making me go to the trouble of reposting elsewhere.

Scott Miller
Manager of Information Systems Security