The important things we need that are speed of releasing signature, accuracy of detecting all dangerous malware that are still circulating in the wild and the overall reliability/stability from avast! rather than the biggest database. Of course, effective-proactive detection is also great to have. 
well my main post was oriented not to get some totals number to “shock” and catch users …
i was mainly interested in Alwil’s new method for submitting virus/trojan/exploit/spyware/malware examples
to Alwil team and it’s fastest addition to Avast!'s VPS if positive one found!
also it was about getting some feedback or info about file(s) submitted (like clean, damaged/nonfunctional malware code, false alarm, not clean(soon to be added to VPS) and so on) …
i don’t care if it’s automated email answer or human written one or some website based enhanced scanner with upload ability … but it must return needed answers …
it’s all about this situation “i sent You week ago piece of malware identified as [i] Trojan.Java.ClassLoader.f [/i] by 18 antiviruses …” and my question is "Is it really dangerous? (seems so), Is this positive match? (seems so) When it appear in VPS (so far unknown)? If not then why etc…
so far Avast! reacts very well to main threat now it’s about smaller evil …
and as it was said Alwil work on solution …
Hmm, it seems like the numbers of viruses that the other companies are reporting maybe due to over-counting. That’s news to me. I always thought those numbers represented unique individual viruses.
When I used Symantec Antivirus, I sometimes would check the number of viruses that were in its virus list. I would very quickly scrolldown the list of viruses that it showed, and it seemed to me that every virus presented was its own unique virus. But then again, I obviously did not run through the entire list to see if 70,000 viruses were actually listed on it.
I too agree that the more important quality in a virus scanner is the ability to detect ITW viruses. Before I downloaded AVG and Avast, I checked to see that they were ICSA certified and when their most recent Virus Bulletin award was (AVG - Dec 2005, Avast Oct 2005). I don’t really know much about Virus Bulletin, but I’m assuming its a trusted authority on the detection ability of virus scanners. Anyways, I saw that both programs did well recently and that gave me some assurance that they have good detection that is atleast up to par (and maybe even better?) than the rest
I don’t know but I don’t think it is over-counting, I think it’s a difference of counting method.
For instance, according to the latest av-comparatives.org test August 2005, AntiVir says it has 202,710 viruses in its database, Dr.Web says 82,894 and I think avast! has approximate 46,000 virus units in its database at that time but AntiVir, Dr.Web and avast! almost have the same overall detection rate level (zoo malware) and also, avast! almost have the same overall detection rate as Trend Micro.