BitDefender.com Bit Defender Product failure, unable to honor warranty Internet

I purchased Bitdefender software about a year and a half ago for my daughters new computer. It appeared to be working fine so I purchased a copy for my computer about a year ago and it worked fine for about 9 months. Around October of 2010, the time ran out on my daughter's computer with Bitdefender. The program stopped working, Bitdefender never sent a warning to renew and the computer was incapacitated with malware. I had an incredibly difficult time finding a phone number to call them. These clowns are virtually all Internet based and if your computer is not working you can't contact them with your computer. It took several hour of explaining this to various people at their help desk after I located a number for them. They also admitted they had no way of telling customers their contract was about to run out and they would be unprotected. Finally, after spending countless hours with them on the phone with no results, one of their technicians admitted they had a security breach themselves on the company servers and it took down their entire system and infected all of their customers with malware.

I still have Bitdefender on my system for now; I will be changing to Viper if it works okay on my daughters computer and before my contract is over with Bitdefender. I get the following message about every 2 days from Bitdefender (it is a message saying Bitdefender is not working anymore and you have to restart your computer constantly to stay protected) this is directly from Bitdefender themselves. Here is the message on the computer screen. Note, this does not pop up when Bitdefender fails, you have to click on the Bitdefener icon and it will be grayed out meaning it no longer works; again there is no notice that you are no longer being protected.

Message: "The BitDefender Security Service (vsserv.exe) is unavailable at the moment. Please restart the computer and try again. If the problem persists, please check our online support website at:www.bitdefender.com/help."

Keep in mind all of this is against the backdrop of Bitdenfender being rated as the number one malware protection software by several reviewers...

From my speaking with people whom work in the Internet world, I was cautioned about buying any products developed in the former eastern block countries and or China; these countries are where all the Internet attacks are coming from to hijack computers and break into USA government computers.