I work for a software company and we provide software to a specialized market (auto insurance rating for state mandated rates). These applications are windows based client apps that are written using Microsoft’s .NET platform.
Over the past few days we have been getting support calls about our software no longer working. This turns out to be happening on machines that have avast free software installed. My guess is this is new as of a recent avast update or virus definition. Customers have also claimed other legitimate software (some of it issued by the states directly) is also being affected.
Avast is also bricking our exe file when it runs this “deep scan”. Once it completes, the exe file can not be run or deleted. If you right click on it and go to properties, all the tabs, including the security tab to try to take ownership or set permission, is all missing. This results in our inability to even have our customers reinstall our software to the same location because they can not remove the original file.
I contacted avast via phone support and they were useless. They advised me to tell my customers to uninstall avast, reinstall avast, setup our program for exclusions list. They expect us to spend support hours telling customers how to configure avast because their product is not working properly. It does not even address the fact that avast bricks a file that can’t even be removed by the system administrator. I asked for some sort of level 2 support or someone who could provide some information outside of a script, and I was told that was not possible.
So it would be nice to get some feedback on this, especially from someone at avast. My current recommendation to customers is to remove avast and use something else. That will not change until this is addressed.
