This article was in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post about free anti-virus programs:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112600170.html
seems they arent impressed with the default skin :-
That ill-thought-out behavior reflects a deeper problem with Avast’s interface – that it’s a mess. The program offers three distinct looks in various parts (its system-scan window appears to have been patterned after old MP3 programs like Winamp)
Maybe the skinless version would be better as default.
im sure this has been argued over more than once
apart from that it looks a reasonable review. 8)
It was started a discussion about here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=17686.0
And why they don’t even bother to take some time and to check all those options avast! offers ?! If they want to make a review, that requires every professional reviewer to go through each and every single one options antivirus has to offer. If he just took some time to do that, he would have found CHANGE SKINS option, and then he can continue blabbing about how avast! is difficult to navigate through… he gave his opinion in one of the most prestigeous newspapers, people will read that and 99.9% will believe in what he had to say… “power” of journalism.
Other parts of the article are not much better either…
Unfortunately, it took Avast an extra day to start catching this week's "Sober" virus -- automatic updates did not add that to its database until Tuesday
Where was he when some other antiviruses took whole week to add some other threats into their virus databases ? Of course, he has no clue, but it happened he ran into this one, so he had to mention it… :
And look at this stupidity (!!!):
Avast offers tech support only via e-mail -- not that Symantec and McAfee are much more generous. (The only major anti-virus program with free phone support is Trend Micro's PC-cillin.)
Was he drunk when he wrote that ? Is he eve aware that millions of people will read that ? Is he even aware that Alwil offers phone support as well for free ? Of course, user has to pay his phone bill, Alwil guys are not that stupid to pay all those phone bills around the world…
Bottom line, what’s about this forum and literally hundreds of forum regulars (members) who are UNSELFISHLY trying to help literally everyone who comes in this forum and asks for help or assistance of any kind ?!! We all do that for free, it’s our good will… I thought if you are not supposed to get paid for that (and neither one of us even ever asked for money), at least you are supposed to get some credits for your trying… but no, reviewers like that guy just see what they want to see… most likely he has no clue that this forum even exists… and we are not talking about some 40 members forum, we are talking about such a huge number of members, that some other more famous forums could crawl under the rock and hide. 
Why on earth no one mentions rapid avast! tech support on FORUMS !!??!?! Is it sooooooooo hard to dig it up? >:(