Like any other program, Active Virus Shield can be disabled or stopped. If you make a conscious decision to stop the program, then this is the desired behavior. However, if other people like friends and family members use your computer you might want to prevent them from disabling protection. Similarly, malicious programs should not be able to turn off protection. To address these situations, Active Virus Shield provides a password-protection option. Although this option is inactive by default, a user can activate this option and provide a password which will be needed to make any setting changes or to disable Active Virus Shield. This protects the program from any unauthorized attempts to disable or downgrade protection.