I have a new machine that I just pushed Avast across my network to that has XP SP3 installed on it. It installed just fine, but the services will not start. This really is not a big deal because I know that it is my password that I passed to it is wrong and all I have to do is go to the local machine and update the password. Then restart the services. This works great on a machine that is on SP2, but for some reason with SP3 I get “Access Denied.”
Now I know that the simple and real easy fix is to correct the password, uninstall and reinstall, but if I do that then I will not know why it is doing it. I also know that lately there has been a lot of integration with IE7’s security and that has been causing some issues, but I cannot say for a fact that this is the problem.
You’re better off with the uninsta/install thing. Does the event log give a reason why services won’t start? Maybe the new [?] tamper protection in the 4.8 client is causing the problem. I’ve noticed that if you use just about anything other than the services applet, Avast won’t allow a service to stop.
Avast is on about 50 systems with SP3 and no known issues.
I finally got it fixed! I question how you got it running on 50 machines with no problem unless you upgraded all of them from SP2 to SP3. I have 2 machines that way and it never affected Avast at all. However, I just got 2 other new machines with SP3 pre-installed and that is where I ran into the problem.
But this was to no avail either. The only actual thing that worked was to go into safe mode with networking, and in there it let me change the password. Then I rebooted and it started working with no problem after that.
The biggest question is why did I have to go through all of that? Was it really SP3 or is it a combination of something that Avast has done that caused it to not work properly in SP3?
I still have about 50 machines who are still at SP2 and Avast 4.8. Those that I did get to SP3 had either Avast 4.7 or Avast 4.8 [as you may know, 4.8 adds a bit of extra self protection].
I think http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949377/en-us may go even further. I had to use that on a few systems but they all seem to have Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 installed [hmmmmm]. This fixed any “access denied” errors when installing SP3.
Although I was told it’s probably overkill [see older thread started by me], I also used a clean boot to install SP3 on maybe 90% of the systems.