Avast 4.8 Home Vista 64 Outlook 2003 crashes random

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

HI, have had issues with AVAST and Outlook 2003 under Vista 64 since installing,
loading outlook, most of the time it will load fine and pull the POP mail, oher times it
starts polling then freezes in the middle of polling, have to close outlook (force) and
restart, then probably will work okay, but sometimes crashes multiple times in a row.
(which causes messages to be re-polled and I get double or triple messages)

Sometimes it crashes when not polling and I am just going through messages.

I thought it was preview pane related as I was trying to process messages delete move
etc but have noticed it also does it right from the startup screen, so not related to
preview pane because I started not touching Outlook until it was done with the initial poll,
but same issue comes up randomly, usually 1-2 x /day. I can not leave Outlook running or
it will be frozen when I get back the majority of the time.

I looked through the forum and did not see anything related to what I am seeing.

A few times it says outlook had a serious error and restarts outlook, but normally it
just freezes with the hard disk light going crazy, and it will not recover, I have left
it for hours to make sure.

The only thing I can tell for sure is AVAST is causing it, and it has specifically said
AVASt on the “check for solutions” page you can select on the few times it does not
just totally Freeze.

I see no crash log files, it just dies

Hoping to find an painless solution for this or have to replace it, at times it takes
killing outlook 3-4 times and getting 3-4 copies of up to several hundred messages,
so kills 20-30 minutes each time ARGH!!!

Running all the latest/greatest Office 2003 updates and current AVAST. Not a single
other system issue or crash except this.

Any one have suffered through this and resolved it?

Thanks in advance for your assistance

Mike

2

Upgrade to Outlook (office) 2007 (or later) and the problem should be solved.

3

Do you have a spam killer application?
Did you have any other antivirus before avast?
Which is your email server? GMail? Yahoo?
How many email accounts are you checking with Outlook?

4

Thanks a lot for the suggestion but I was not looking to spend $
to get a free anti-virus program working right.

Mike

5

I just have the Junk Mail filter in Outlook, I think that was a component of Outlook
and not a 3rd party one. I run all other spam filtering on the server side.

I have Spybot running but only installed that a month ago, this problem has been
happening for about last 2 years since I installed Avast, I had nothing before that.

Yes, I am trying to remember, it was several years ago, I had the free package
that Road Runner offered for a couple years, I think it was from CA Associates.
Somewhere along the way I think there was a special program I had to run to cleanse
the reminents of this before Avast would install initially, but again it has been about 2
years.

Is there some areas If could look for file reminents that would conflict with Avast ?

Everything is standard POP/SMTP to my privately owned and managed email servers.
I thought this might be a problem, but the freezes did not always happen during polling
but happened also even scrolling through the message list window after polling was long
over.

Right now, only 5. I tried disabling them all except one about a year ago as a science fair
project but it still happened.

I appreciate any help you could give.

Regards,

Mike

6

Years? Did you try an avast installation from the scratch?

I’m not used with CA antivirus… but if you remove it a long time ago, probably it’s not their remains that are interfering.

Are you sure that one account is not sending copies to the other?

7

That is what I thought too, but pulling at straws.

Yes, they are all separate accounts

Initially I did but since then it has always been upgrades, I may try to totally uninstall it
and start over, but I wonder it it will leave anything laying around that needs cleaned up
first.

Thanks for tryiny to help, I sure appreciate it.

Mike

8

Just checking back to see if there were any solutions to this yet. Happened 2x yesterday and
once this morning already. Last ditch effort to keep avast on my PC, else I need to remove
it and use something else.

Thanks,

Mike

9

This also happens to me on XP Pro 64-bit, with Office 2003. It happens not only with Outlook, but also with Excel and Word, and I’ve had it happen with other (non-Office) applications, also. In Task Manager, it is always the case that AshWebSv.exe has the CPU tied up (99%). If I right click on the Avast “a” icon in the tray and choose Stop Provider > Web Shield, everything returns to normal. I can then restart the Web Shield and it works fine.

This is annoying, but I have so far not found any pattern to the occurrence of this problem. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.

10

Exactly. Very random. Will try that when it dies again, see what that does.

Mike