OK, I have a new bug-bear... bloody AVG 8.0 Link Scanner! Trust it to be the one piece of PC software people ought to be using to foul up the internet! I thought that was Norton's job

In case you don't already know, this lovely little piece of software will pretend to be Internet Explorer 6 and actually visit every website in a google, msn, or Yahoo search results page and scan the page it visits for malware and the like; all well and good you may think. No. This actually creates a ridiculous amount of internet traffic which completely screws up website traffic reports, but most importantly it uses loads of internet bandwidth and can (and has) cause small web servers to become overloaded with these false hits and crash, as if hit by a Denial of Service attack. That is not mentioning the bandwidth cost to you, the innocent browser, too - it's like you've visited and loaded every result in your google search, putting your bandwidth limit (or fair usage policy) under threat.

The only way to solve this problem is for you, the user, to disable the Link Scanner component of AVG 8 (if you use this software, that is), and ultimately for AVG to abandon this technology as there is no way in Hades that I can see it working without sapping bandwidth. I know of at least one web server that has had to block the AVG client (oh, did I mention that it pretends to be IE 6?) which also means that all IE 6 users get blocked too. So if you still use IE 6 and have been wondering why you're suddenly unable to get to certain websites, it's because they've had to block IE 6 due to the AVG Link Scanner problem.

There, I'll get off me soap box now!


EDIT: I have just learned that the only way to disable the Link Scanner is to install AVG 8 without it, so it looks like you will have to uninstall AVG 8 completely and re-install. Here are some links to helpful sites:
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