Optical discs as a storage medium suck. They're fragile, slow to read in non-sequential order and make the machines noisy and more prone to failure. They can't die fast enough.

I always find it a bit sad that game consoles have almost entirely gone from the switch it on and play instantly to the PC's wait-half-an-eternity-to-install-and-patch routine (I'm looking at the PS3 in particular).

SD-Audio uses CPRM (the SD DRM), although as far as I know is only available in Japan at the moment.

I use AVG8 Free fairly stripped down but this hasn't happened to me. Did you install SafeSurf/SafeSearch? I found those features useless and annoying you couldn't deselect them at install.

/REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch as a command switch to the installer will remove those two features.

I'll agree that AVG8 Free by default is pretty annoying and memory hog-ish, but if you get rid of the silly Internet Security features you're left with a reasonable on-access scanner with a UI better than Avast!'s IMO.