avast incompatible with secondary display adapter

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I have reformatted and reinstalled Windows xp Home, and updated to SP3. I reinstalled drivers for my Radeon 8500 AIW AGP (primary) and Radeon 7000 PCI (secondary) display adapters. I was rebooting frequently to get the hardware working. Everything was going well until I reinstalled avast! 6. Then the boot flash screen (Windows xp logo with blue traveling bars) froze again. I rebooted in safemode and disabled the secondary display adapter, after which the normal mode boot proceeded smoothly. I have toggled back and forth several times to test. From this I conclude: avast! 6 is incompatible with a second Radeon card. I have been running with the card disabled but am not happy about it.

The drivers for both adapters are identical, version 6.14.10.6517.

In safemode, the resources for each card show as:

8500
Memory Range E0000000-EFFFFFFF
I/O Range DE00-DEFF
Memory Range FE9F0000-FE9FFFFF
IRQ 16
I/O Range 03B0-03BB
I/O Range 03C0-03DF
Memory Range 000A0000-000BFFFF

7000:
Memory Range F0000000-F7FFFFFF
I/O Range FD00-FDFF
Memory Range FEBE0000-FEBEFFFF
IRQ 22

2

hey do you had any trouble before with those cards when using avast?

where you using the latest version of avast? when you installed avast 6

could be that the card is broken have you checked that? or are they new?

3

Strange…
In this case, I’m really not sure if it’s possible - but would you be able to create (and upload) a memory dump (taken at the moment the machine is frozen), as described here?
Note: a PS/2 keyboard is needed for that, USB wouldn’t work.

4

That is for sure.

How to invoke memory dump creation?
http://support.avast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=71

5

Kenny, use your glasses, as igor already posted the link. :wink:

6

@Mikaelrask: I’ve had the card for over a year and had no problems with it. I just switched from McAfee to avast 6 last week and had trouble immediately. This saga began at http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=83125. Because I traced it down to the secondary display adapter I thought a repost with a new subject was warranted.

@all: Luckily my keyboard is an old PS/2, so will try the memory dump.

I have found a partial workaround as follows: boot with avast installed and the secondary display adapter disabled. After boot, disable all avast shields and enable the secondary adapter. If the shields are not disabled beforehand, the monitor attached to the secondary adapter will not appear in the display properties Settings tab. Once the secondary adapter and monitor are working, restart the avast shields. I just have to remember to disable the adapter again before shutting down, or the subsequent boot will fail.

7

No go on the memory dump. I get to the frozen splash screen, hit the ctrl-ScrollLock, and nothing happens. To check the functionality, I again disabled the secondary display adapter and rebooted to the Choose User screen (xp Home). From there I was able to ctrl-ScrollLock and start the memory dump, so at least I did the registry change correctly. Rebooting again, I tried ctrl-ScrollLock during the splash screen (with blue moving bars); this triggered a reboot but no memory dump. So, when the machine freezes, the system won’t even crash on ctrl-ScrollLock correctly.