I'm familiar with the report. Programs that were detected as false positives include:
* the task manager
* Quicken
* ATI Drivers
* the GIMP
* other antivirus programs (including products from Kaspery, ESET, Avast, and Trend Micro)
* VLC
* Cygwin
* Acrobat reader
* text editors (including Notepad2 and Notepad++)
* TrueCrypt
AV run in the real world on these settings would be disastrous.
Issues with the samples used by AV Comparatives:
* The malware sample size is only around 1 million.
* The sample size of clean programs is far too small.
* The malware samples used aren't public. We don't even know if the malware used by AV Comparatives are found in the wild anymore.
More generally, evaluations like those done by AV Comparatives and similar organizations are misleading. What actually matters is the vulnerability window. This window is generally a week or two and occurs after a piece of malware is released into the wild. It is the amount of time it takes AV vendors to get a signature distributed. Most damage is done during the vulnerability window, during which infected machines will have their AV disabled by the virus. The fact that your AV can detect viruses released years ago actually doesn't have any bearing on your security; it's a meaningless evaluation of the product.
You have to ask yourself, why don't AV vendors report numbers like the percentages found in AV Comparatives? They don't because they know it's bogus. Sure, most AV vendors will list AV Comparatives and others as an "award" or a "certification", but they'll never list the actual number. I think that should tell you something. In the real world no one is experiencing detection rates like those in the report. If they were, you can be sure the numbers would be part of an AV marketing campaign.