My friend got a malware infection (a Google redirection hijack). Since he’s not real tech savvy, I offered to fix it for him. Acting on advise from the top-flight experts at MajorGeeks’ Malware Removal forum, I was able to thoroughly remove the malware. The guys at MajorGeeks, upon reading the logs created by software they had me install on my friend’s computer, confirmed that his computer is malware free.
But I discovered that the avast! Antivirus on my friend’s computer (avast! FreeAntivirus version 6.0.1125.0, the latest version) is unable to update its engine and virus definitions or the program itself, despite the fact that I even went so far as to COMPLETELY uninstall it (using, by turns, Add or Remove Programs, Revo Uninstaller, and avast! Uninstaller, even going so far as to clean up all remaining traces of avast! with CCleaner) and then reinstall it. It keeps giving the error message “unable to connect to server”. That seems very odd to me, since MY computer CAN connect to avast!'s server, and both computers are now connected to the same wireless router (mine).
I even tried updating avast! in Safe Mode, logged on as Administrator, as well as using an administrator level user account, both in Safe Mode and in Normal Mode. I’ve even tried it with my firewall and my antimalware scanning programs disabled, but no dice. I even tried it with Java temporarily uninstalled.
And for what it’s worth, avast! has just recently (but consistently) started giving a false positive for a program associated with my friend’s Hewlett Packard printer.
By the way, the guys at MajorGeeks even had me run a program to look at the registry, and found no problems there.
For a detailed record of the problem to date, see the “Google redirection hijack & other malware” thread (http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=238455) at MajorGeeks’ Malware Removal forum (http://forums.majorgeeks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35).
Incidentally, I just discovered to my surprise that I can find no way WHATSOEVER to disable avast!, short of uninstalling it. I don’t mean that the means provided to shut down avast! aren’t working, I mean that no means to shut down avast! are provided in the program, as bizarre as that may sound, at least that I can find.