A little help....

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hey…

I have Avast 4. something installed on my computer.

Somehow, I have disabled the resident scanner and can’t get it back, so I’d like to know how to restart it…you know, the little icon at the bottom of the screen…

Secondly, I stupidly downloaded something I shouldn’t from an MSN Messenger screen and though I know it’s in my computer somewhere, Avast can’t seem to find anything…

I’m worried it’ll be a keylogger, hacker or something similar…and that it will take over my MSN Messenger account or something…

Any advice on these subjects would be greatly appeciated…

2

Do you have the ‘a’ blue icon on system tray with a red cross in it or, on contrary, you don’t have any icon (shonw or hidden)?
If you have the icon, right click it and start the protection.
If you don’t have, repair your installation: go to Control Panel > Add/Remove programs > avast! antivirus > Remove. Then choose Repair function in the popup window (Repair). You must be connected to the internet while repairing.

After that, run a full avast scanning.
Other scannings with antispywares and antitrojans will be good too. :wink:

3

Ok, I’ve repaired it as you said, and there is still no blue ‘A’ icon…

I’m just about to run a full virus sweep…but I don’t have any other protection except Avast!, Sygate Personal Firewall and Yahoo Antispy…

What should I do next?

4

Do you have ashdisp.exe running at startup?
What happen if you manually start ashdisp.exe into avast folder, does the icon appear?

5

Yep, that’s done it…I have the ‘A’ back, thank you :slight_smile:

So what do you think I should do if Avast! doesn’t find anything after doing a thorough search?

What happened was…

A message came up from a contact, and I stupidly clicked the link and it downloaded something that has disappeared from where it downloaded too…

Obviously some kind of virus…but standard scans before didn’t detect anything…

6

That will only work until you next reboot, so you would need to create a desktop shortcut or create a shortcut in the startup folder.

For now I suggest if you have XP or Win2k, you could enable a boot time scan.
Try the, schedule boot-time scan in avast’s menu (or try the ‘Schedule Boot-Time Scan’ using RejZoR’s AEC avast! External Control Tool. Otherwise boot into safe mode and run a full system scan from there.