Is a P2P download safe?
Avast has a free home edition. It has a resident scanner that will scan some P2P traffic, but I’m pretty sure you can turn it off and scan on demand. I’ve been downloading strange files since the BBS days and I can’t remember ever having anything but a false positive for viruses (knock on wood). Spyware is a pain but it’s usually bundled with the shady P2P clients. It would be pretty dumb to add a trojan to an out-of-market piece of software just to seed it on a P2P site, since the effort wouldn’t be worth the number of people you’d catch. In general, hackers these days want to cast a wide net. That’s not a good security policy, of course, but for a one-off instance, you might want to take the risk. You could also setup a vmware virtual machine to use as a sandbox. It’s not a perfect solution, but, again the cost
