I'm looking for some trade press reviews of Avast. How well does it catch viruses compared to other popular scanners.

The most respected antivirus test authority is the Virus Bulletin ( http://www.virusbtn.com ) – see the VB100 award section. Unfortunately, the test results they publish on their pages reduce to simple PASS or FAIL status - meaning that a program has caught ALL (hence the VB100% logo) ItW viruses (PASS) or has not (FAIL). To read the full articles, you’d have to subscribe to the printed version of the Bulletin (which is rather costy).

Also, an industry-standard test lab is the ICSA Lab – http://www.icsalabs.com

There are also other independent AV test centers on the Internet - see e.g. http://www.av-test.org and http://www.checkvir.com .

Hope this helps,
Vlk