Hello, I’m Daemon. I’ve been programming for over 10 years and have been a loyal user who swears by Avast to everyone, but have recently been running into some issues.
— Background —
About a week or so ago, I was infected with malware that was grinding my system to a halt and ended up having to wipe my computer. As I always do, the very first things I do after booting for the first time are install my drivers using the disk I ordered from the manufacturer, installing Avast, and creating a “clean slate” system restore point (in that order).
After doing so, I installed MinGW64, MSYS, and Netbeans to begin working on a project. It built properly without any warnings, but when I tried to run the application, my system froze for about 2 minutes and I was greeted with the blue screen of death. I figured perhaps it was a bug in the toolchain, and just in case I inadvertently caused damage to my pc, I used my clean restore point and installed MinGW/MSYS 32-bit as I have always used it and trust the source. Instead of Netbeans, I was now using Notepad and building my applications manually from the terminal.
When I ran the applications I built, I was confused because they were ran twice. The first time was within a sandbox environment which I assumed is a new feature avast recently added, and the second was the default execution. A little aggravating, but bigger issue was that 1 out of 5 times, the application would freeze before it even started and I would have to kill both processes from the task manager. The issue became even more problematic when I tried to write a small assembly stub for the entry point of one of my projects. Then it escalated to the point were it would crash half the time.
I also started having other problems like windows explorer stalling for 2-5 minutes at a time, being unable to open the task manager or use system shortcuts like Ctrl+Alt+Del, and entire system freezes that required hard rebooting which most commonly occurred when watching videos on websites, but was not limited to it.
I realized that if I disabled avast, that pretty much all these issues disappeared. If someone could patch these bugs asap, it would be much appreciated. 
I’d rather not have to switch to a different virus protection software if possible.
— The Issues —
- Applications are opened twice
- Applications crash randomly
- Entire system freezes often, especially when watching videos on website
- Blue-screen of death (sometimes)
— Specs —
Platform: Dell N5050 Inspiron, Intel Duo Pentium x64 @ 2.3GHz, 500GB HD, 4GB ram, Intel 2000 “Sandy Bridge” GPU
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1 (clean installation, system and drivers up to date)
Avast Version: 2014.9.0.2013
Virus Definitions Version: 140130-1