Avira AntiVir Personal is probably the best free anti virus software. It is free of charge, updates daily, detects almost every virus, troyan, worm or whatever, and is not as annoying as other software as Kaspersky with lots of security warnings, extra firewalls, ect…

The only bad thing is that after every update a popup containing advertisement is shown. This banner is always the same and shown almost every day since AntiVir updates as often as once a day. Here I will show you how to disable the annoying ad banner without having to hack/crack/patch AntiVir.

This works only with Windows XP, perhaps I will find a way for Vista or Windows 7 some time!

Click on Start -> Run… -> type “secpol.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter to open the local security settings.

If you never created any security policies before, you have to set them up first. In order to do that, right-click the “Software Restriction Policies” entry on the left and choose “Create New Policies”. If you did anything in that section before, you can skip this step.

Now the folders “Security Levels” and “Additional Rules” should be there. Navigate to “Additional Rules”, right-click and choose “New Path Rule…”. In the window popping up click browse and navigate to your AntiVir folder (usually C:\Program Files\Avira\AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic) and select the “avnotify.exe” file. Set “Security level” to “Disallowed” if it isn’t already and hit OK.

This tweak forbids the execution of the “avnotify.exe” file which is responsible for the popups. Deleting the file is not possible, AntiVir will crash when trying to access it. This works as long as the filename of “avnotify.exe” is not changed through an update, and if it is, you can do the same thing for the new file.

Thanks to ghacks.net