All of a sudden I’m getting a warning popup from the Security Center, if I pause one or more of avast’s providers, saying that my a-v is no longer active. The accompanying tooltray icon disappears once I resume the provider(s).
The same is happening with a warning about my firewall (ZA free) – I’m on dialup, so normally start ZA before connecting and shut it down after disconnecting.
No big deal to shut down Security Center’s monitoring, which I don’t normally bother with anyway, but it got along fine with both avast and ZA until the last day or two.
The timing coincides with the latest Spybot S&D def update, which found a registry entry relating to the firewall which it didn’t like and which I “fixed”.
Is the best guess that it’s a glitch in the new SS&D’s defs causing a false-positive? Or is there something else I should be looking for too?
Neither avast nor Ad-Aware (both fully up to date) is reporting any problems.
P.S. Ran HijackThis too, and that’s not showing anything unusual either.
You will get a warning if you pause any of the providers that you use on startup, same with the firewall. But as long as it was you that shutdown/paused the programmes and you are happy then it’s not a problem. As long as you are offline of course ;D
Can you post more info from the S&D backup file? I mean, this could be the ZA problem but I doubt it could be avast! trouble with Security Center.
Generally, on a dial-up the firewall won’t take resources when off-line. The ZA consume could be related to the service (vsmon.exe) but are you using XP or 98? Are you sure it’s a good practice shuting down the firewall while off-line?
I’d never gotten that popup warning before, regardless of whether I had a-v and fw monitoring on (usually) or off, until this latest SS&D update, so it seems reasonable to assume that’s somehow involved.
As for shutting down ZA after disconnecting my dialup connection, maybe that’s open to question. But it’s (the free version, anyway) a resource hog. And while I might be open to attack thru my IP, which is the whole point of a firewall, I think the chances of an attack by dialing into my phone no. are probably infinitessimal (sp?).
I did check over at their forums, and there’s a whole thread involving this, and it is definitely a new addition to the Spybot defs. Generally the advice is to just add it to Spybot’s ignore list if you’re sure you turned off monitoring yourself.
But the original question still stands, about why Security Center is suddenly popping up warnings about ZA and avast (if monitoring is on) when it never did before, at least not for me?
Why not ask the Spybot people on their forums at :