You may wish to check out this page about "Education & Science over at OSalt.com.

It lists science-related open source software, including some previously commented on examples, such as: Octave, Sage, or Scilab.

Enjoy, and good luck!

While I agree that this spoofing is potentially problematic, I do think there is a reason they're doing it. Obviously their intention is to increase their users' security, by including the LinkScanner option, and perhaps spoofing IE is just a means to that end. Assuming this to be true, ultimately the aim of this extra measure is with good intent (better security = good). Besides, as many people have pointed out (including me, in another reply), you can omit these features during installation by some command line usage. Additionally, I might point out that the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html offers additional hints at backing down some of AVG 8.0's resource hogging aspects that other commenters have complained about.