Does Avast pro protect against phishing?
There are so many kinds of phishing, Vinny, that you should probably narrow your question down quite a bit.
The vast majority of them use pretenses, rather than anything technical, and rely on the user’s gullibility. So there’s no defense against them other than the user’s common sense and his learning safe-surfing (and safe email) habits.
Thanks for that. ihave posted another message under explorer timeout as i am worried that a dialler may be on my system although i have run a complete pro scan and the viruses i found were put in chest and i deleted em.
No, it is an anti-virus program, however, if there was malicious content on the web page then it is possible that the Web Shield provider would detect it.
This is possible in some Browsers already, where it should be really.
I have responded to your other thread (not here), can you expand on this there, e.g. full error message details or screen shot.
I use MSN toolbar with its anti-phishing plug-in. I turned off all its other features and use google as its far better especially for pop-up blocking.
Also, this may be of a good option as well. 
Google’s Firefox Safebrowsing extension.
Another option is spoofstick, I have used it for years in both IE and FF http://www.spoofstick.com/
I found SpoofStick less than impressive, it couldn’t even cope with URL masking.
If you are using free web space but you don’t want to appear a hosting cheapshot, you can buy a domain name (really cheap and no hosting bill) and use URL forwarding (redirect) and masking, so clicking on a link to your domain name will forward to your free web space but display the Domain name in the URL window.
Oh didn’t know that
Neither did I untill I saw it and I had been using the spoofstick extension/toolbar. When I clicked on a link and saw no warning by spoofstick, the URL displayed matched the link I clicked, but the images loading and hovering over other links on the page displayed on the status bar didn’t match the URL in the URL window.
This was some time ago, I haven’t checked if this is still the case, I kind of lost faith and removed it. Now I trust in common sense, watch the status bar when loading, Dr Web extension to test unknown links first and avast’s Web Shield.
The most frequent recomendation for an antiPHISHING
tool I see on the antispyware forums I “visit” is :
Netcraft Toolbar
http://toolbar.netcraft.com
What ever happened to google extension, is that good enough?