Avast keeps crashing computer during scan

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi,

I’ve been using avast! for well over a year now, and have had no problems…until now.

6 months ago I got a new computer, and I installed avast! 4 since I liked it on my past machine, and it has been running happily on it all that time.
Then this afternoon I tried doing a full system scan, and just before it gets to the end of the scan the computer, mouse, keyboard all lock up and become unresponsive. control + alt + delete doesn’t work, nothing works. After a few minutes of this freeze the computer gives me a lovely blue screen of death and then restarts all on it’s own, but first chk dsk does a scan and corrects disk errors. Once the computer is back up and running my browser opens and I see a message from Microsoft telling me that device filters such as the ones in anti-virus programs can cause this hard drive error issue.

avast! is the only anti-virus program that has ever been installed on this computer.
I do not use the Windows Firewall and it is disabled.
Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall is what I do use, and I have had no issues using avast with this firewall before.
I have checked my firewall settings thoroughly and see nothing that would cause a conflict whatsoever.

I have done nothing more than check email today then tried to do a full system scan with avast, then I got this issue.

I use Windows XP Media Center Edition with SP2, I use windows auto-updates, and I have already tried defragging to see if it helped, which it didn’t. I have a Intel Pentium D ViiV Dual Core 2.8 Ghz Processor, 2 GB of RAM, and the only other security tool I have besides avast! and my firewall is Ad-Aware SE, which I haven’t even run in a couple weeks.

My computer runs fine as long as I do not try to do a full system scan with avast! 4.

I don’t do any file sharing or P2P stuff, I don’t use instant messengers, my browser is Opera 9, I haven’t downloaded anything today, and the only email I’ve opened was sent by my wife, and that passed scanning also. I also don’t go to websites I don’t know and trust. I’m a web designer and I am aware of all the tricks malicious sites use.

Any ideas what could be the problem? I really like avast! and don’t want to have to switch to anything else.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

My suggestion would be to try a repair of Avast.
You need to be connected to the internet to do this.

Start/Control Panel/Add Remove Programs/Avast (Change Remove) scroll to Repair.

Run Repair and Reboot HTH.

3

It would be good if you disable the automatic restart of Windows after a BSOD.
In Windows Events you’ll see the report for this BSOD, which was the error (fault) message?

They should not conflict… but both use low level drives to scan/protect your computer. Problems could happen… most of them could be solved :slight_smile:

4

Thanks for your replies guys. :slight_smile:

Ok, I ran the repair and rebooted (wasn’t aware of that feature! cool), then I ran a scan again with avast, and once again it got just near the end, locked up and restarted on it’s own. Then, I get a dialog box once the computer has booted up that says “your computer has recovered from a serious error”.
After that, my browser opens on it’s own to this page:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/response.aspx?SGD=8b0f5281-1d6a-4201-88c4-209a6a7841cd&SID=708

It has to be the anti-virus because that is the only time this occurs, plus, this is an HP that I haven’t touched inside other than to clean it (until today, read on). I have double checked that all cables are connected properly. Master and slave settings should be/are exactly what the manufacturer set them to. I haven’t done any large file transfers. I double checked that all my cables work by trying them in a spare box which has avast and ran it and it worked fine. I have no bad sectors (I did a check). And I do not have Standby or Hibernation enabled. I don’t use a screensaver either. I even tried turning off my firewall during the avast scan and I terminated any non-vital processes this time. Still kaput.

So, I’m completely stumped.

Any ideas? anyone? please? :wink:

5

Ah, nevermind. I’m not going to keep putting my hard drive through this to test and/or run a free program, just going to have to switch back to AVG, it never caused any problems like this.

I’ll still use avast on my other two computers, it’s happy on them.

Thank anyway guys. :slight_smile:

6

The antivirus reads the files on your hard disk (probably even those you normally don’t access). So, if your disk has a bad block somewhere, it certainly may demonstrate during an antivirus scan - but it doesn’t mean that it’s the antivirus fault, of course.