Scarecrow - 3:43 pm on Jul 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

Surf Shield is only in the paid version of AVG, as far as I can determine.

Search Shield is in both the paid and free versions. That's the one that operates on links found on Yahoo, Google, and Live search-results pages.

The LinkScanner component in AVG, in both paid and free versions, is disabled for website prefetching, but it still does a local DNS lookup and pretends that this is just like the old component. However, AVG owns linkscanner.com, and the Lite version of the stand-alone LinkScanner, still available for free on that site, is still doing the website prefetching. Their user base is small, fortunately. The .htaccess files recommended widely to catch the old AVG will also catch the LinkScanner Lite prefetches.

I believe that the 404 hijacking occurs on Search Shield as well as Surf Shield, according to information I received. I'm going to do some testing today on the free 138 version of AVG and see if I can get the 404 hijack to work. If I can, I'll throw Wireshark on it and see what it sends to AVG. I'm curious about whether the registration info is sent to AVG, and I'm curious about whether any cookies are left by AVG, and I'll also try it on a custom 404 page to see if it replaces that, as well as replacing a standard browser 404 page.