Avast blocking Yahoo IM

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Ever since I installed Avast, I can’t login to my Yahoo IM. I have rebooted twice and even registered the product. I also paused the IM portion of Avast. What’s going on?

PS.
I made sure that the Windows firewall showed allowing the IM. I had to fully stop Avast, then the IM worked, then I restarted it. All seems to work now but why did it do that?

2

If you Stop (not Pause) avast! resident providers one by one - when (i.e. after stopping which one) are you able to login?

3

Pausing each of them…and eventually all of them did not allow me to login at all. I had to “stop on-access protection” and it went right in immediately.
I’m logged in now and restarted it and it stays connected, but if I logout of the IM it won’t let me back in unless I do the “stop on-access…” again.

My computer is running Vista Home x64.

4

That’s why I said “Stop” (each of them), not “Pause”…

5

I see, that is available only from the right-click menu. I stopped the IM and it let it log in.

…but of course if I log out of the IM and try and get back in, it won’t let me again.

6

Really don’t know what this might mean… ???
The thing is that the IM provider doesn’t do anything network-related, it just scans files… if it were WebShield, for example, that would be different.

What exactly does it mean “can’t login”? The connection stalls… or some error is shown… or something else?

7

I narrowed it down to being able to terminate the “internet mail” section and it lets me log in. If that particular one is started, the IM waits and waits to log in and finally gives up. As soon as I terminate that service, it lets me login within a second. Why would the internet mail one block the IM access?

8

Yahoo messenger probably uses ports intercepted by the mail scanner that expects mail traffic there. You can direct the mail scanner to ignore messenger’s connections. Open the Avast4\DATA\avast4.ini file in Notepad and add this line under [MailScanner]:
IgnoreProcess=YahooMessenger.exe
and save the file (click YES when asked by avast self defense module).

9

That did the trick! :slight_smile: Thanks!

–KZ