An Austrian web site called AV Comparatives has done an ‘independent‘ test of 17 different Anti-Virus products and released the results online.

On this site you will find independent comparatives of Anti-Virus software. All products listed in our comparatives are already a selection of some very good anti-virus products. In order to get tested by us, companies must fulfill various conditions and minimum requirements.

Several free AV products were included, you can find the test here:

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Navigate to ‘Comparatives – On-demand comparative / February 2007′

Microsoft’s Live OneCare was the only product receiving “Standard” level results detecting a fairly low 82.40% percent of malware.

The ‘winners’ were AntiVirusKit (AVK) with 99.45% and TrustPort AV WS with 99.36%.

Most seemed to score 96-97% detection with another group around 93%.

You can see many reports and results here:

AV Comparative

You can find additional in depth reports and details here.