Applications blocked at start-up

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I’m having an annoying problem, and to be honest I’m not sure its Avast related (I’m only suspecting it).

After booting my WINXP SP2 system about 50% of the time a number of applications do not have Internet access being Trillian, PopTray and FreePOPs. Closing the down and restart them again manually solves this problem.

The reason I suspect Avast has a hand in this is that I noticed that when Avast is started in the beginning only 5 of the 8 services are operational. 1 off course being the Outlook/Exchange service the others I suspect are the Internet Messaging and Internet Post shields. These last 2 are exactly the shields the blocked applications use for Internet access.

Could it be that because these application load before the Avast services are active they somehow are being blocked ?

I’m running Outpost 2.7 as my firewall and on the OP forum a say a post describing the same issue also running OP in combination with Avast so could be those 2 don’t work well together at start-up.

Hope that somebody can help out here.

2

Maybe. Try Startup Delayer.
It’s the only freeware I’ve found that controls the windows startup (Windows 98\Me\2k\XP) that does not follow a strict order. You can set some applications to start very after the boot (logon) itself. :wink:

I think not… antivirus and firewall could be in ‘conflict’ at startup, trying to ‘know what is happening’ but few seconds after I have avast and Outpost running quite smooth in my system 8)

3

Thanks I will give it a try, did not know that program it looks like an intresting piece of sw.

4

Some Feedback.

After trying “Startup Delayer” for a couple of days and playing with the setting I now have the problem programs delayed for 24-32 sec. and everything seems to be working as it should. ;D ;D

Thanks again for the tip.

5

You’re welcome.
Enjoy avast and support. If you can, come back to help the others 8)

6

I find your experience very interesting because I too am having delay on bootup with Avast and my Firewall (Zone Alarm free version) seeming to fight each other, ZA finally being allowed to boot much later than usual after a message informing me it is now loading (which it never did before Avast).

Which program did you delay: your firewall or Avast?

Thanks.

7

Hi Anderson2,

I’m afraid my problem was a bit different than yours.

Both Avast and Outpost (my firewall) were booting OK (although OP seems to delay the whole booting process but that’s an other matter: see http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=14062.0).

I have a couple of applications that loaded before Avast/OP was fully loaded. One off them (Avast and/or OP) are blocking Internet traffic ass long as they are not fully loaded and thereby preventing these applications to work.

So what I did was delay these applications so now they load after Avast/OP are fully loaded. I did not delay Avast/OP

If you need to delay one I would go for delaying my firewall, I would never ever want to boot my system without my AV active.

8

It is a correct approach from firewall to block all internet access until it’s fully loaded - after all that’s the firewall’s work, to block net access.

The firewall should suspend the operation until it is fully loaded and can verify if it is a correct request or not. Perhaps trillian and friends are not willing to wait that long or they don’t retry the listen (very probable) if they load before OP.

The bottom line is: avast is not a firewall. It should not block net access. It has certain services that monitor net access (internet mail, web shield) but these start to monitor when they load - so they are not blocking anything until fully loaded. If you need that you must configure it in firewall. Moreover, I don’t think trillian accesses mail or web (port 80), it uses it’s own ports so it should not be affected by avast at all.