Avast is blocking Excel.exe and all excel files and moving them to the virus chest on 2 of our 20 computers. We had an update yesterday and I suspect that has something to do with it. I scanned the exe files as well as the excel files the users were trying to open and found no threats. It does this every time you try to open an excel file. I uninstalled Office and reinstalled on one of the computers but it had no effect. The only way I was able to make excel work was to do a global exclusion on the two computers. Then it works fine.
@ pctech & waicookie
You don’t say what avast version you are using or what MS Office version ?
Depending on what avast version you are using you can do a ‘Restore and add to exclusions’ from the virus chest, but you have to be very sure they aren’t infected when taking action like this.
I guess this is a very old version of MS Office, so the files probably aren’t digitally signed and would score lowly on the file reputation side.
I had this happen for office 9t on my XP Pro system, it was a case of adding an exclusion for the excel.exe and winword.exe files in what was the old autosandbox process, now the DeepScreen.
What concerns me is your saying it is also alerting on other files:
If you can give some samples of the location, file name and malware name given on the detection.