For the past few days I have been getting a popup that says, “An application is requesting access to a protected item”.
It happened first when using Firefox, but did not show up when I used Chrome, but a few days later it began to appear when I start Chrome too.
The dialogue window has 3 buttons “accept/allow” , “cancel” and “details”.
Obviously I have not clicked “allow” because I don’t know what this is or even what item is being requested to open.
If I click “cancel” or “x” to close, the dialogue box does not disappear. It just continuously reappears with a slightly different name in the “details-description” window.
If I click on “details”, the new window says:
“Program” C:\Archivos de programa\AVAST Software\Avast\AvastSvc.exe
“Description” (THIS CHANGES EVERY TIME)
“Type of Access” Access to a protected item
Some of the variations of the “descriptions” are here in the following screenshots:
Can anyone tell me what this is or how I can find out what the “protected item” is in the first place?
Edit: I don’t seem to be able to post screenshots.
I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to disable this or “suppress” this notification. That would not fix the underlying problem and would probably cause even bigger problems.
Honestly, that link is terrible advice. The person in that thread was creating a self-signed certificate and using it to encrypt data.
I am getting this notification when I open a web browser. Those are not the same things at all.
Did you even read your own link Eddy? Or are you just a scraper bot?
What I want to know is:
If this is actually Avast that is requesting access to the protected item (this seems unlikely given that the “details/description” changes every time I click “cancel” or “x” to close).
What exactly is the “protected item” that is being requested access to.
OK, may I recommend you search for a newer OS, like Linux or something. Windows XP is a very vulnerable OS, with no further updates being pushed to the OS.
As for Avast!'s “odd behaviour”, is it still continuing? Is Avast! attempting to scan something on your drive? Any other symptoms? (Eg: Slow, Avast! becoming disabled etc).
Yes, the odd behavior still continues. The “Avast” request happens whenever a browser icon is clicked.
I’m not sure if Avast is trying to scan something on my drive. How would I find out if that was happening? How do Idetermine what item is being requested access to?
Furthermore, this PC cannot currently update Chrome or Java and Zone Alarm does not fully install and consistently posts notices that “the program cannot update, please uninstall and reinstall” even though the manual update button seems to work (I know this is not your area of concern but I thought it might be worth mentioning).
Also, for a while in the past week, when I visited a weather forecast website for my area, the page showed weather in Moscow, Russia. I know that those weather websites track by IP. I don’t live in Russia.
Funny you should mention Ubuntu, I was doing searches into switching over to Ubuntu just before all this started.
Cheers,
Stephen
Addendum: Just want to say that while XP in officially unsupported by Microsoft, many security companies including Avast, continue to offer services and solutions for XP users. At the time of writing, there is a specific redirect from the Avast webpage for XP users.
Disabling the AVAST “SafePrice Browser Extension” and "Wi-Fi Inspector"components did not work.
The error message “An application is requesting access to a protected item” continues to stay on the
screen until reboot. The message was in ‘gibberish’ text in my UTF-8 XP computer.
