Well, you're in luck, as the Astaro firewall is one of our enterprise products 
The issue you're experiencing is due to the firewall being configured to block downloads of installer packages (this is enabled by default), and the file you're downloading is in fact an installer package. You can contact your listed customer support for your Astaro product if you need help reconfiguring the firewall settings. They can also provide feedback to the SAV Mac dev team, so if you treat this as a firewall issue instead of an AV issue, you'll actually get access to our support department instead of just this community forum.
I presume this is for using a personal laptop behind a corporate firewall, but I should mention that SAV Mac HE is a home-use product, and we have an enterprise version with support for non-home-use such as business, educational, non-profit, etc. (you might even get a deal on it should you need it, since you're already a firewall customer).
hm, hope this is the right place to post.
anyway, i haven't been able to update my antivirus for a while now (since 9/6/2011). the console log simply tells me that "failed to count the number of files in 'system/library/startupitems: no such file or directory". 
do i need to reinstall sophos? and is there any way to fix the problem w/o reinstalling? i'd rather not uninstall as a.) i'm a (fairly) new mac user and b.) i've heard that uninstalling programs on macs is a pain in the bootay.
(btw, i first installed sophos because it was the antivirus provided to me by my university. as it turns out, my university has since ended their formal contract with sophos -- could this be the reason why my antivirus isn't updating?)
Let's answer your last question first:
Yes
You are using our Enterprise product, and all updates are provided by your university. As such, you are supposed to use your university's technical support for help.
However, since they no longer have a support contract, your best option is to uninstall the Enterprise product and install the Home Edition (which is what these forums support).
Generally, uninstalling programs on a Mac involves navigating to the Applications folder, and dragging the application you want to remove to the trash icon on the dock.
However, because of its function, Sophos Anti-Virus installs things all over the place, and is most easily uninstalled with an uninstall program. See the uninstall instructions for SAV 7 Enterprise for more details. That thread works through the confusion between the two products as well.
Once you've uninstalled your current AV software, you can download and install the Home Edition -- for your purposes there is very little difference, other than that updates come from Sophos instead of your university, and you control the software instead of the university administrators via SEC.
