Hi all. The main Status tab of my avast! Free GUI reads, ‘Everything up-to-date,’ (see attached screenshot) but the stated version is 2014.9.0.2021, which is quite out of date. When I try to update manually it fails with:
Last encountered error: Unknown error
(see attached screenshot)
How might I troubleshoot/resolve this?
Thanks in advance.
Perform a clean installation of the latest version.
Download Avast Uninstall Utility to your Desktop.
Download the correct version of Avast
Avast Free
Avast Pro
Avast Internet Security
Avast Premier
Disconnect from the net
Uninstall Avast via control panel
[]Run the uninstall tool and accept the reboot to safe mode
[]Once complete reboot your system
[*]Reinstall Avast
Thanks. That appeared to have worked. I guess I’ll have to monitor it for a few weeks to ensure that it updates properly.
More importantly though, is there any way to determine why this occurred, so I can avoid it in the future?
Thanks again.
I don’t think that there is anything specific that you need to avoid to prevent it happening again.
My best guess is that trying to update such an old version of avast from the UI (Manual Program Update) could be fraught with potential issues, mainly the big differences in versions with different features and functions.
Provided you don’t leave it so long between program updates or go for a clean uninstall of the new version hopefully you should be good.
Thanks. I’m not concerned so much with why the manual update failed. I’m wondering why the automatic updates ceased to fail. This is a system I’ve used pretty much every day for ~3 years now, with no errors/warnings from Avast (none that I can remember at least). As in the screenshot, the main Avast screen always read “No problems. Everything up-to-date,” while in reality the program and virus definitions had not been updated in over a year.
Might there be some logs I can examine to help determine the issue? If not I guess I’ll just monitor this new installation to ensure that updates are occurring automatically.
Who knows what went wrong.
There are so many 0’s and 1’s in a application.
If only one 0 thinks he is a 1 things go wrong. 
It is not possible to found out what went wrong since a lot of avast (and other) files have changed.
Just be happy that it is working again and keep an eye on it to if it keeps working.
I don’t know if it will help you, but some people have a list of things to do/check e.g. weekly or monthly with/on their system.
Some things on such a list can be :
To get to the reports and logs, this may help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntW8zGicUfk
Thanks for that. Alas since I uninstalled my previous version, it appears those logs were uninstalled as well. Good to know anyway, thanks.
My pleasure. 