Whenever I plug in my Walkman into my laptop (Windows 7 Home Basic, 64 bit), it should enter MTP mode–something that is intended for file transfer.
However, after installing avast 7, the computer could no longer detect my Walkman, as an MTP nor as a plain removable media. Even worse, Device Manager does not show anything connected to the USB ports.
There are no driver problems as I confirmed that disabling the shields, solves this issue. But it would mess up my laptop’s security if I’ll have to disable the shields whenever I connect my Walkman.
Maybe you could narrow down which shield is causing the problem. Instead of pausing all shields at once, pause them one at a time. For example, go to web shield → stop → stop for 10 minutes, and during this 10 minutes, test the behavior. Repeat with each shield (even if you already found one that makes problems, there might be more than one involved), and then report back.
This way, it would narrow down where the problem is.
Just to be sure, could you also delete the firewall rules related to avast and to this Walkman connection (if any)? Then the firewall rules are re-created anew.
There aren’t firewall rules that could actually meddle with Walkman’s MTP. Furthermore, the problem doesn’t seem to go away with just one shield disabled. It has to be all of it.
I’ll try tweaking some more and see if I can post back more info about this problem.