To illustrate my point on my packer of choice not setting off AV flags. This is from one of my most recent releases:
The original file:
http://virusscan.jotti.org/en-gb/sca...e62cff0ea46b10
The packed file:
http://virusscan.jotti.org/en-gb/sca...96af74f8e40148
I'll do a more comprehensive scan with VirusTotal once their service comes back online, but the results will be pretty much the same, perhaps just with the odd rarely-used AV program flagging something up as 'generic'.
For the record, I do my research before trying anything out of the norm, especially when it's going to be used on a 'product', essentially, which someone is going to buy. Out of all the packers/protectors i've tried (and it's a massive amount), PECompact is the one which gives great compression ratios, is feature-rich (a plugin system, many options etc), it's cheap and it plays nice with AV's. It's one thing to mess people about with free stuff, but a paid release is quite another, and i'm aware of this.
There's are reasons more and more people are starting to use PECompact on files when they previously used an alternative packer, and although I can't speak for them, I bet it's the same as my reasons above. Cheers.