[Mashiro]

I went for Bitdefender.  That loaded great, but then immediately it wouldn't allow me to get into my regular Websites, saying they didn't have certificates, that was a lie.

This happens because the web protection of these antiviruses is performing a man in the middle attack on all encrypted web traffic by installing its own SSL certificate to decrypt the traffic of sites using HTTPS in order to scan it for viruses and other malicious things.

Usually the antivirus installs its own certificate into the root of the OS CA storage. So there should be no errors. However maybe it didn't work out this time properly. If it works out also depends on the browser because Firefox has its own SSL certificate storage while many other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome (Chromium, Opera and other browsers that base on it) and Safari use the OS CA storage. The other reason for it to fail and spit out errors is a properly configured web server on the sites that detects the man in the middle attack and denies the connection with a SSL error.

This kind of web protection is dangerous. The traffic is getting encrypted by the site for the antivirus, the antivirus decrypts it for scanning and encrypts it again for the browser where you finally see the site. In the middle when the scanning happens it can modify the page to its liking. It can send data including login data and etc. to the servers of the company that made the antivirus or even worse to some servers in China.

Just disable web protection and everything should be fine.

Windows started to download updates, when there was no instruction for it to do so.

This is something Windows is known to do at exactly the wrong time and when no one needs it.





About the final question of this thread. Sadly I have no answer. You don't seem to be using Windows 10. It comes with a 10x better Windows Defender version built-in. And otherwise I'm not using any antivirus or antimalware solution. Merely a waste of resources.

I usually only have common-sense.exe installed and brain.exe also works.