I have not notice AVG which I use giving me any problems when it comes to slowdowns.

AVG has worked very well for me, I am sure there is a hit like anything else that is running in the background but on my Core2Quad no slowdown at all. Older machine with very low memory I can see having issues but that can be said for anything old.

As for the article, AVG must be somewhat popular for them to go after it, considering they could have gone after so many others.

AVG 8 is a pain if you leave it in standard mode of trying to check every hit in google, or pre-check each site that you want to visit. It really slows IE down, much like those other crappy IE addons and plugins like Google/Yahoo/MS etc.

Prevx 2.0 is such a hog.

And you can never know what they do with the info that program uploads.