I indeed asked for support on 10/2. I got word back on 10/4 and sent the requested logs on 10/5. I got word back on 10/6 that they had to escalate this to a higher chain and that that would normally take two days. This asked for a little more of my patience. This was on Monday. I said no problem and gave them until the end of the week (6 days) because otherwise I would have to take other measures, meaning I would have to swap anti virus brands. (can you blame me for losing trust in a product that acts like the very thing it is supposed to prevent??)
This morning I received a reply, stating that if I continued "threatening" (yes, those exact words! Simply for saying I would only wait for one week!) the customer support they would "close the case immedately". (who's threatening here?) If not, they would go "very far" in their effort to help me.
They also sent a CC of the mail they received from ESET HQ in which they stated that I probably changed some setting, resulting in the aforementioned behaviour. (which I did not, I clearly stated that I completely re-installed the anti virus from scratch after deleting it first) In other words: it was my own fault.
I've never in my life received such a reply from any customer service. If you ask me, they don't have to go "very far", they already went over the edge. I do not wish to give my money to a company with such a rude customer service, and I regret being one of their customers for more than 10 years.
There was also no real reason for this public post by the customer service person. I never made any public statements about this and would have left it at that. But since they chose to attack me publicly, I believe I'm entitled to defend myself.
Oh, and indeed, yesterday I got rid of ESET and installed Kaspersky instead. Everything now works just fine. So Xerox owners who experience the same problem (and I know there are several because I found several other cases on this forum): you know what to do.