[deanhills]

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.

Exactly what I did.  I removed it completely though.  Bitdefender is probably better than Microsoft Security Solutions, but I was fighting against time.  But then it got worse when I tried to go for an extra cleanup - temporarily disabling my Windows, but looks as though when Windows worked on fixing itself, that it may have solved my original problem with Microsoft Security solutions - so far it's still up and running.  I'm still holding my breath though.  

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.  

You're right.  Windows 7 is now archaic.  I've just got so much going on right now, and changing will take a huge adjustment with all of my old equipment that will need to work with it.  But yes, Windows 10 is obviously much better.  Like by leaps and bound.  Thanks for helping HR.  Another thing the near Windows disaster did to me was tonight to do a fresh round of backups - this has also been overdue, but I thought that that had to be done first.

Haha .... brain.exe .... Today was one of those days where so much happened with Windows but nothing to show for it. I went mostly with instincts and at one point I thought it had landed me in Windows hot water. I was doing things that defied my common sense. Fortunately I just sat it out when that Windows little working circle kept going round and round for about 30 minutes, I waited it out. Windows fixed itself - what a relief that was.