I’ve been using the free version of Avast! for a couple of years with no issues. Things changed with the last forced update. Today I upgraded to the Internet Security version and the problems continue. I am able to reproduce the lockup. It seems that Avast! is having problems with files in the …\appdata\roaming\Microsoft directory. The file it freezes on varies but the directory is always the same. It appears to hang on a given file and eventually the whole system fails to respond (mouse, keyboard, etc.). I manually have to power down, come up in safe mode, restart and then come up normally.
I can manually exclude the offending directory and the manual quick scans will complete without problems. But, boot-time scans always lock up the system. Any ideas?
This is Windows 7 Home Premium, 32-bit, Avast! v5.1.889 with everything up to date.
Try to enable the report file creation for the particular scan you’re running - and let everything, even OK files, to be included there.
When it freezes again, the end of the report should show the real last file (or possibly the one before - the last scanned file may not yet be in the report).
I enabled report generation for some custom scans. The file in the Avast! display when the system stops responding doesn’t match with the contents of the report file. Since blocks of output are probably buffered before writing, the last block probably isn’t being written. So, the report file didn’t tell me much. No matter how I structure the scan, it always has problems in c:\users.…\appdata\roaming* directories.
Any other suggestions to help with finding out what is going on?