My XP SP3 system upgraded to Avast 7 a couple of days ago and upon reboot Acronis True Image Home (2011) Continuous Data Protection (CDP) crashed in afcdpsrv.exe. Tried upgrading to the latest Acronis release (ATIH 2012) but still had interop problem with Avast 7. I was able to downgrade to Avast 6 OK and things are stable once again.
I know this sounds more like a problem with Acronis however, but it looks like Avast is causing interference with volume/file operations (snapshots) done by Acronis during backup/snapshot cycles. Also, the Avast 7 release is the newest software in the mix.
Check the avastUI, Real-Time Scanner, Behavior Shield is set to Ask, as it may be making system changes that may be considered suspicious.
Do the same for the Additional Protection, AutoSandbox, Settings, set to Ask mode.
Check the logs for both of these , C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AVAST Software\Avast\report, to see if there are any instances reported for that afcdpsrv.exe (or other acronis) executable. If so add it to the exclusions.
Thankyou for the suggestions – I did setup the rules as you mentioned, but there were no events logged or asked. I did dig into the Acronis failure a bit more and here’s what I see happening (caution technical stuff follows):
I do see messages such as these in the afcdpsrv log just before it crashes:
15:51:00: tid=0x0000163C>EVENT_ONERROR driver log:
15:51:00: tid=0x0000163C>AFCDP3593: KCdpSession[88B0D000]: OnError - created change 88893AF8 0xC00000BB for
15:51:00: tid=0x0000163C>AFCDP3593: KCdpProtectedVolume: Failed to get file name (OnOpened) with status 0xC00000BB
15:51:00: tid=0x0000163C>AFCDP3593: KCdpProtectedVolume: Failed to get file name (TryGetName) with status 0xC00000BB
It looks like their driver (afcdp.sys) is getting STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED (0xC00000BB) errors for FS calls going thru the underlying driver (aswSnx.sys). The curious thing I also observed is that after the initial install/upgrade of Avast 7 and before the system was re-started, CDP continued to work. I think this is due to the fact that aswSnx was not loaded yet or was above afcdp in the FS stack. I changed the afcdp file filter’s ‘altitude’ so it loaded before aswSnx and so far no hangs or crashes (keeping fingers crossed).
Going forward, someone at Acronis and/or Avast should check on their products inter-op. The solution I came up with is only a hack work-around at best. The Acronis software is not very robust in handling these (un-expected) errors - looks like memory pool corruption followed by crashing. And, the Avast driver shouldn’t be causing them in the first place.