avast! 4.7 professional, scheduling boot time scan greyed out.

Hi!

I’m trying to schedule a boot time scan cause of some problems with Win32: Tenga (it affects every .exe so I need to get my system scanned before windows starts). Problem is that when I start the program and go to the menu, the option to schedule the scan is greyed out, what might be causing this? I’m logged in with administrator rights. My OS is Windows XP 64 bit.

– Wilde

The boot-time scanner is not supported in the 64bit version of Windows. However, in this particular case it shouldn’t really worry you. It’s not a good idea to clean Tenga with the boot-time scanner; I suggest to start Enhanced User Interface and launch avast! Virus Cleaner from its menu (also possible using the big “Clean the virus from the system completely” button in the virus dialog, if you have it there). The Virus Cleaner should deal better with Tenga.

This was my first approach at the problem, but the thing is, after the initial scan and a reboot, the scanner is still picking up files with the Tenga virus. With the 3rd scan going on now, I’m still getting lots of hits from files with Tenga in them. I’m fearing that one of the system files is infected and that when windows is running it spreads faster than the scanner can remove it. But if you think virus cleaner tool should be able to handle it, then I will keep running it until I get no more hits.

Thanks, Wilde

Strange… don’t you have some network shares open - allowing other (infected) computers on the network to infect back the already cleaned files?
For avast! Virus Cleaner to fix the problem properly, no other programs should be started while it’s running, and the computer should be rebooted as soon as it’s finished (I believe it asks for that itself).

No other computers on this network, and its not the same files that I get the infected message from, rather it seems that the scanner is unable to find them all at one sweep. But seems like the number of infected files is going down with each sweep now, once I get 0 hits I will reboot and see if it picks any after the reboot. The scanner doesnt ask for reboot after the scan btw :slight_smile:

– Ville

I also have only my browser running at the same time, not too many programs installed, my windows install is quite fresh (2 days old), most of the files that are infected are from my old windows hard drive. Also turned off system restore cause it seemed that some of the restore files were infected aswell.

– Wilde

Hm, if different files are infected after the cleaning is finished, it means that there was an active virus in memory (during the cleaning) and reinfected some files while Cleaner was fixing others. However, the Cleaner disables any active virus copies in memory first (just to prevent this) - so unless another infected program is started during the process, it shouldn’t happen… :-\

After 6 runs I finally got a clean sweep, seems like the scanner was just unable to clean all the files with a single sweep. But the problem seems solved now as 0 files are infected.

Thanks, Wilde

I suggest to run another scan - using avast! (not the Cleaner), and let it scan the content of archives. Just in case something was hiding somewhere…

Igor, just a question to learn…
In these cases, won’t help using the Cleaner at Safe Mode?

Well, hard to say. As I said, (for the set of supported malware) Cleaner is supposed to disable any active virus instance in memory before it starts to clean the files. So, it shouldn’t really matter if it’s started from safe mode or not.
On the other hand, it’s probably less likely (in safe mode) that some tool will be periodically/automatically started when Cleaner is running and interfere with the cleaning this way…

Thanks Igor. What we learn is that we should NEVER start a program or open files while the Cleaner is running 8)