In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

After suffering KIS2011 when looking at its interactions with tbbmeter and getting the same number of crashes and poor responses from IE/Chrome when KIS was running I gave up on it.

To me the thing driving the need for faster machines and more memory is AV and firewalls,

As a test, I've recently had KIS 2011 running with Chrome and TBBM without any problems whatsoever. This was on an XP Home box with a 2.8 Gig Athlon with a SiS chipset, a Gig of DDR, 100 Gig IDE drive partitioned to 40/60, an old nVidia 128M gfx card and onboard NIC. I've run KIS 2010 (My preferred release) on lower spec machines without too many problems.