The research - which is the headline feature for the latest issue of the long-standing technical security magazine, Virus Bulletin - says that Computer Associates, PC Tools and Symantec failed the company's long-standing and stringent test of seeing if the WildList of malware can be stopped by the application in question.

Under the VB100 test - which dates back to 1998, Infosecurity notes - applications must detect 100% of the malware, and must not generate any false alarms when scanning a clean set of files.

In his editorial, John Hawes, Virus Bulletin's test director, said that the biggest issue the research team encountered was a lot of serious instability - 'blue screens of death' and crashes, as well as screens that have shut down or overheated.

It is hard to tell if this is the influence of Microsoft Vista, but you'd rather be without anti-virus than have it kill your machine, he argued.

Most of the 12 products that failed fell to a polymorphic file infector, but there were also quite a few false positives, Hawes said.

Although the publication is pay-for subscription, Virus Bulletin does allow a free download of its summary tables that date back to 1998, as well as selected elements of the test proper.