I know nothing about VCP itself but do know about computers and how Windows has become a less and less user-friendly OS as time goes on.
If you're not willing to dig through registry edits, group policy and potentially BIOS settings to prevent updates, then I'd use O&O ShutUp 10 to strip out most of the annoying Windows stuff as well as disabling automatic updates and many other things. I would apply the recommended changes then have a scroll through and decide what else you want rid of.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Just make sure to make the changes to the user and system levels.
As for Chrome, it'll probably be an issue with certificates and or a false positive on whatever they're using for virus signature detection. Or they for some reason didn't like the zip file, only they know. The download link itself returned no issues from Virustotal:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/bde2 ... 38d731ab54
I couldn't get the file to download no matter what I tried so suggest using a non-chromium browser like Firefox to get it for now if you haven't already managed to get it downloaded. You can then upload the exe to something like virus total and see if anything is flagging it as suspicious.
If you use the machine only for VCP then you could probably go ahead and try to disable Windows Defender permanently using group policy. A guide I found:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-perm ... windows-10 : Heading
HOW TO DISABLE MICROSOFT DEFENDER ANTIVIRUS USING GROUP POLICY
Just exercise a generous amount of caution online going forward if you ever need to on that machine.
If you use the machine regularly for other tasks then you're kind of stuck to going into the AV and disabling it each time before you run the exe. There's a section in the same guide linked above for temporarily disabling it. A faff that shouldn't be needed but it's better than having no AV at all.
As for the cause of the issue itself, I'd raise it with VCP somehow as if it's only become an issue recently something may have changed that's causing a false positive or a certificate has expired at the start of the year. They being the software vendor are more likely to get the detection issues resolved rather than reporting it to Google, Microsoft etc.
Hopefully it gets sorted as the last thing you want to be doing is dicking about with the tools trying to get them to work rather than doing the job they're needed for.