Another AVG convert.

Hello all, Yet another satisfied AVG 7.5 user who didn’t want to “upgrade” to an all-in-one solution. So I ran the AVG installer to remove it, and installed Avast! 4.8.1169. All went O.K. and nothing was found on the boot scan. After a couple of days I’m getting the hang of it, and I’ve managed to stop the “help” page and changed the MP3 player skin to the “Simple” one, by following advice on here.

I haven’t found any problems with Zone Alarm free edition, or Firefox & IE7, although it has increased the boot time somewhat. I do have a few questions which I hope you can answer:

I don’t use P2P, or Instant messaging, so I have disabled these from the Access Protection Control. Is this safe to do? The intention was to reduce use of system resources if possible - my laptop isn’t particularly fast, and only has 512Mb of RAM.

I often download .Zip & .Rar files and have always checked them both before, and after extracting the contents. Should I continue to do so?

And lastly a strange thing - I removed all AVG entries from the Zone Alarm programme control, yet they keep re-appearing. I have searched through all the programme and documents and settings folders and can find no remains of AVG, but there are still some registry entries. This is only a minor annoyance and I can always try the ZA forum, but any suggestions would be most welcome.

Regards.

P.S. Using XP2

Welcome to the forums and the avast family.

As you have found there is a vast amount information on the forums, many don’t find the search function though ;D

You can do as You have with providers that you don’t use, they would only be required if you used the associated applications. You could go a step further if you wish and actually uninstall them (windows add remove programs, avast! Antivirus, Change/Remove, Change, scroll down to the providers you wish to uninstall and uncheck the option).

Since you disabled them (? Terminated) they aren’t actually running they won’t be using any resources only taking up a little HDD space, you could just Terminate them and answer Yes to the question to persist the changes.

If you are using a download manager, etc. where you can give a location to scan them, then you could have avast scan them. Assuming that you installed avast! in the default folder, this is the path needed to scan downloads, C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashQuick.exe

If not then there is no problem in scanning them manually as it is a good practice as by default zip, archive files aren’t scanned as they are inert.

I would say the problem may lie with ZA, though it might be worth running HiJackThis to see if there are any remnants. Program & Tutorial - Also useful as a diagnostic tool - FileHippo Download - HiJackThis - HJT Information HiJackThis Tutorial.

You could post the contents of your log file here.

Yes, go ahead.

If you use a download manager, make a link to ashQuick.exe to scan them automatically.

Can you check which is the full path of the application that is asking permission to ZA?

Welcome :wink:

Thanks for the responses.

I have “Terminated” the Instant Messaging, and P2P shields and I’m happy with that. The disc space isn’t a problem, but any thing slowing the P.C. down is!

I don’t use a download manager so I will continue manually checking as I have been doing. The reason I mentioned doing it twice is that the one time AVG caught something was after I had unzipped a file. It was immediately quarantined, and I then emptied the Virus Vault. It hasn’t been detected since - I run Spybot 1.5.2 & Adaware 2007 weekly, and I also intend to do a full scan with Avast! weekly as I used to with AVG.

The strange problem with ZoneAlarm only happens after re-booting the computer.
Before I get involved with “Hijack This”, here are the path names as shown by ZA:

C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG Free\avgwb.dat
C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG Free\avgw.exe
C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG Free\avgcc.exe
C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG Free\avgemc.exe
C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG Free\avginet.exe

I have looked again, and those references are no longer shown on the C drive, so as you’ve suggested this is probably a ZoneAlarm issue.

Thanks again.

If you set the Standard Shield to high it will be detected when the download finishes or even before, with WebShield. There is no rush to empty Virus Vault, called Chest in avast. Files are safely kept there and could be restored in case of false positive detection.

I think these entries (and files) could be safely removed if you uninstalled AVG.

No problem, glad I could help.

avast will also detect when you unzip the files as it will scan newly created/modified files (depending on their file type) and any executable file would also be scanned before it would be allowed to run. So there is also an extra level of protection, though it won’t hurt to scan them when you download them.

It may well be a ZA issue, just check that you have hidden files and folders unhidden, see image.

Welcome to the forums.

Tech and DavidR, I have duly set Standard Shield to “High”.
As for the AVG path names, I leave hidden files visible all the time - it’s only me poking around in them!
I have just run another Search looking for these in all possible places and nothing was found, so these must be in ZoneAlarm somewhere. It’s only a minor gripe - I have set the access to “Block” anyway. I might post on the ZA forum. If they have a solution I will report back, as it may help someone else.

Regards.

Just to let you know that the best balance between performance and protection is ‘Normal’.

I too agree that Normal provides the best balance between protection and performance, I have left mine that way with the exception of a short trial. Of course you can try it and if there is no performance impact on your system then no problem.

Thanks guys, as a follow up I asked for help on the ZoneAlarm forum, the answer was to do a reset of ZA. I guess these entries are not made by AVG, so aren’t removed when uninstalling.

I will almost certainly be changing my elderly parents P.C. over to Avast! - I just want to be sure that it’s not going to make (my) life difficult!

Regards.

You’re welcome.

shortwave,

Welcome to the world of partially uninstalled security application of which AVG is one of the worst. Its quite a while since I used ZoneAlarm, but as David suggests, ZA may not know that AVG has been uninstalled - how could it?

Have you tried using a Registry checker such as CCleaner.
http://www.ccleaner.com/download
It should pick up the ZA enties pointing to the non-existant C:\Program Files\Grisoft
AVGFree\avgwb.dat, .\\avgw.exe, .\\avgcc.exe .\\avgemc.exe, .\\avginet.exe

RegSeeker is a bit more aggressive, but lets you remove LEGACY entries for AVG

Otherwise, start regedit and search for “AVG Free” & “Grisoft”

  • it may reveal some incorrect entries in the ZoneAlarm keys.

You could also check that the three AVG XP services have been removed.
Also you should go to Device Manager → View > Hidden Devices > Non-Plug and Play Drivers to check that those from AVG have been removed - my system with AVG has five there all with names starting with AVG or AVG7 .

Hope this helps,

Maurice

MauriceW, Thanks for your input. I think “Welcome to the world of partially uninstalled applications Period” would probably have been more appropriate! I have already had experience of this from “Open Office” when I tried to solve a problem with that programmme by uninstall / reinstalling. Now I look in hidden files & folders for all the settings, etc, left behind. I ran CCleaner and it didn’t solve the ZoneAlarm problem. Wonderful utility though! But as I’m assuming these entries are made within ZA the first time an application tries to use the internet, I can understand why AVG’s uninstall wouldn’t remove them.

I found some entries with Regedit, but as this was not a particularly serious fault I decided to leave them alone. I followed your final hint but didn’t find anything via Device Manager.

Avast! seems to be running nicely on my laptop, apart from the even longer boot up time, so I will swap my elderly parents desktop P.C. over to Avast! shortly. I will have to ensure they are aware of the little box and voice prompt about virus updating, otherwise there are bound to be calls of “What’s it doing now?”

Thanks, once again.

There is a beta trial going on (beta version 4.8.1192) and that has improved several things and I can’t recall if that includes boot duration (but I think so), hopefully it shouldn’t be long before this is released as a program update.

I don’t know if you yourself migh find that an option the beta is relatively stable, avast beta 4.8.1192, see http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=34612.0 for information and link to aswbeta.exe which starts the conversion to the beta build.

Perhaps not the beta build for your parents though.

So, forget them… Windows will remove the old legacy drivers (this is what programmers said, I never saw Windows removing anything from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root.… LEGACY_

Or just disable them… Program settings > Update (Basic) > Details