There are some things I think you don’t know. There are several catogories of files that are harmfull for a system like:
Viruses, Trojans, Worms, Spyware, Adware, BrowserHijackers. Anti virus software (as the name says) primary task is to detect viruses. Some anti virus software also detects other things, but it is not their main business to do so. So for a full scan of a system for harmfull things you need several things. (Click on the link in my signature for more info)

Both Ad-Aware and Abiword don’t contain any malicious things if you download them. So I wonder where you got them from, can you tell me?