I do voluntary work at a place for computer related tutoring, and I’ve been in the process of moving all of the PC’s over from AVG and MSE to Avast due to it’s superior detection rates, however I have noticed some strange issues on one of my XP machines (I have also seem some network freezes on other XP machines but they aren’t as bad).
Basically, what will happen is that I will open a folder on the network share and it will cause the service’s memory and CPU usage to skyrocket (about 350 MB of memory and 98% CPU usage). Sometimes it will sit at anything up to 3 minutes before the memory usage goes back to normal, and whilst this is happening Explorer will freeze and the folder will be completely inaccessible until the memory usage goes back to normal. On some occasions I have even seen the memory usage return to normal only to start skyrocketing again immediately, in a process that will repeat 2 or 3 times before I’m able to browse the share normally. This problem seems only to afflict XP, none of the Windows 7 machines on our network exibit the same behaviour with Avast. I looked into the System event log which contained no clues, and tried updating the driver for the network adapter which did not alleviate the issue. The machine is an old HP machine, a Pentium 4 2.8 GHZ, with a gig of memory, a SATA hard drive, onboard Intel graphics and the Network card in question is an onboard Broadcom card (All drivers up to date, machine is running XP professional 32 bit, also fully updated). Version of Avast in question is the latest. This issue doesn’t happen when I disable Avast’s shields so the problem is definitely related to Avast.
Obviously disabling Antivirus software every time the network share is accessed is not ideal, so if anyone has any idea as to what could cause this problem or how I may fix it it would be appreciated. I’ve tried adding the network locations to Avast’s excluded folders but that also made no difference.
Thanks