""To myself you should never go by how good an antivirus can cleanup a system, it is how well it can protect a system there are so many free malware removal tools that can do a much better cleanup for infected systems.""
I agree. AV is for prevention, though they can scan decent after the fact if they are a top tier performer.
What you want are emergency on-demand malware scanners like: HitMan Pro, MBAM, MBAR, Dr. Web Cureit (AV/antimalware hybrid), TDSS Killer, KBRD, and Dr. Web Live CD.
Viking,
I checked out the results via that link. To show a good example of what Littlebits is saying, look at Bitdefender vs. G DATA; you could easily go with G DATA and be better off because the two security products would be flip-flopped in the test if it was related to prevention instead of removal after the fact.
I get where you are going with it though.
You could also have a competition with all of those AV's after tweaking them. If you had an expert users that are experienced for each one of those products, and they all went head-to-head, there would be a shuffled outcome, more than likely. Kaspersky could still be at or near the top though. I think a lot of it is how conservative or aggressive the factory default settings are for each individual product. That is the most deceptive aspect of anti-malware and AV product testing, I believe. Who knows how much better some of these would perform if they were set up a little more aggressively, esp. on defense, not solely clean up after-the-fact
