I was able to snag a couple free copies of a few different ones, namely Computer Associate's ezTrust and Trend Micro's (v 11) Pc-Cillin Anti-Virus.
I had opposite results. ezTrust is by far, one of the worst anti-virus applications I have myself ever touched, including norton's. Its not bloatware, its just "doest like to work"ware. I got their ezArmor package, which had their ezTrust antivirus and firewall. The firewall NEVER ONCE worked, everytime it said "error has occured' Yes, of course i reinstalled it and contact support, they were horribly dumb and basically told me I was out of luck. So I said forget that, just tried the anti-virus. Well, that never worked right either. Their support told me a newer version than the one that I got in the box is out, and that I should upgrade. Except the upgrade wasn't free, and I wasn't about to pay for an upgrade when I had to put out money to get it in the first place. I ended up complaining long enough until they eventually got me a free upgrade ;-) So I give them props there.
Either way, the Anti-Virus was horrible. SOOOo slow, crashed often, had horrible luck with it.
A few weeks later, I got the new version of Pc-Cillian for free (God, I love my job sometimes) and installed it, replacing the wounded ezTrust. Trend Micro's Pc-Cillian is amazing...its VERY fast, not bloaty at all!!!!! I love it, and have been using it for a few weeks with no problems.
Within the last week, I experimented with Anti-Vir. It worked good, but was very slow. At least I didn't have the problem running it in safe mode, when AVG simply refused.
Just my quick review over the last few weeks.