When installing Avast Free 6+ approx six months ago, my Vista machine locked up.
I’ve been using Avast Free 5.0.677 (before and since).
I decided to try it again over this past weekend. Total lockup on Vista pc. The pc boots, desktop comes up as normal, but clicking on anything does nothing.
So for the time being I’m using AVG 2012 on the Vista box.
Avast Free 6.0.1089 (which is the version I’m talking about) works fine on my backup XP.
I don’t dare try Avast Free 6 on my wife’s Win 7 box.
What precipitated this was on my wife’s pc (still using 5.0.677) it found a win32:malware-gen hit.
I had this same hit on Vista. MalwareBytes found nothing. Spybot found nothing. Spyweeper (resident program) found nothing. I uninstalled Avast 5.0.677 completely and reinstalled from scratch.
Same virus hit. That’s when I tried Avast Free 6. The hit was on aswrundll.exe! Imagine that!
I really like Avast and would like to get back to it. Any help would be appreciated!
Are you uninstalling your current AV first then running the vendors removal tool to eliminate leftovers before installing avast ?
Who/What tells you that the hit was in that dll file?
About installing from scratch, you should run, under Windows Safe Mode, the removal tool of older security software you used to HAD.
If you plan to come back to Avast, first uninstall AVG from “Add/Remove Programs”, and then run their removal utility from Windows Safe Mode.
Then run Avast removal tool, also from Safe Mode, and only then install Avast anew.
For Avast, the removal tool is located at http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility.
For many other security tools, their removal utilities may be found at http://thewebatom.net/uninstallers/security-software/.
Don’t forget to select the correct folders to delete and the correct exact versions of the security programs.
Don’t forget to reboot between each uninstall/change/clean/reinstall.
This happened to me also, but I’ll create a thread soon about my story.
Thanks for the input folks.
The win32:malware-gen hit occurred using the full scan via 5.0.677.
If I use the avast uninstall utility, will the current downloadable version uninstall vestiges of both avast 5 and avast 6 or would I need an older version to uninstall avast 5 stuff. If I did have to have two versions, I assume I would have to run uninstaller for avsst 5, then uninstaller for avsst 6. Hopefully current uninstall utility would clean all remaining from both. Then attempt to install avast 6 from scratch again. ???
Of course, also running avg uninstaller and delete steps…
Yes the uninstaller will remove all versions of avast, you will have to uninstall each one at a time with reboots inbetween.
After deleting i would also run a search for Avast and Alwil because there could still be remnants in the system, try looking in programs, program data, users and also run a search for Avg.
Once you have completed that go to regedit and right click in the left pane and click on find, type in Avast and click find next, as the avast entries popup you will have to delet them one at a time and re run the search each time until there are no avast entries left, note that the last entries for the search to find will be legacy keys and you wont have to worrie about them and its to hard to explain how to delet them.
Now you can run a search through regedit for Avg also after running there removal tool that ady4um supplied you earlyer, have fun and if something in the registry doesnt say exactly Avast or Avg then dont touch it or you may trash your system, of course there is the easy way by running Eusing reg cleaner which i find quite safe but to be sure always let the cleaner make a backup before removing files http://www.snapfiles.com/get/eusingregistry.html
CCleaner is a good program to get yourself also to clear out any junk on your system http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard untick the google toolbar during install.
Per the suggestions, I uninstalled AVG, ran the AVG removal tool.
I ran the Avast removal tool.
(Rebooting between all procedures.)
I loaded latest Avast 6.
Every other time I booted, the pc locked up as before: desktop showed fine, but could not click on anything on the desktop, Start Menu, taskbar.
In the meantime, the win32:malware-gen hit on the aswrundll.exe file disappeared on my wife’s pc.
She still has Avast 5.0.677 loaded. As noted in original post, this was what started the whole exercise.
I restored my pc back to a state before this started using a Nero drive backup file I had created a couple of weeks ago (thank goodness!).
I’m now back to 5.0.677, the win32:malware-gen hit on my pc disappeared, also.
PC now working fine.
Maybe test a version 7 when it comes out, but eventually may have to go to AVG, if not able to get any Avast upgrades that don’t break our boxes. As of now, staying with Avast 5.
I hope to continue with Avast!
Was win32:malware-gen found to be a false positive that Avast team fixed?
I noticed you also have spysweeper and spybot which has been known to cause a few issues with avast, mainly with the teatimer being active in spybot , if your not running the teatimer while getting these detection’s try uninstalling spybot and spysweeper
Preferable to use malwarebytes and superantispyware as these do not cause any problems with avast.