Avast not running

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Avast under Win98SE, in case I forget to say later.

It’s been installed and running for about a week. At some point yesterday, I realised its icon in the system tray had gone away. Soon afterwards, I discovered a couple of programs had stopped responding (an internet time synchroniser and, worryingly, msgsrv32) and I rebooted.

Still no Avast tray icon.

Ran repair. This time, after reboot, the icon was there but no services were loaded, or - it said - could be found. At some point, I got the error about memory being impossible to allocate, which I fixed last time by changing the databases line in the .ini file to XML, so I went and changed it to XML again, rebooted and - no tray icon.

Looks like the program updated itself yesterday. And the result seems to be that I have no resident antivirus. Any ideas how I can put this right?

[Added later] In the absence of any response to this, I have this morning uninstalled it entirely, observed that my system is running perfectly well without it (just in case anyone suggests that the program that repeatedly dies with Avast loaded would have done so anyway) and have both checked for spyware (none) and left it checking itself for viruses with AVG.

Avast seems better featured and doesn’t hit performance quite so hard as AVG, which is why I switched. But it seems clear that the 21/4/04 update has caused many problems; it also seems clear that the requirement for ODBC drivers in its default configuration still needs to be sorted out, with the possible proviso that its alternate use of XML may now be broken.

What do I expect from a free program? What I always expect: something that’s good enough that I can convince myself to pay for a license. In the absence of any responses to this, or any later feedback that suggests that these problems have been resolved, I probably won’t feel too confident about trying it again…

Bests

Tim

2

Hi,
I’m having the same problem with Win98. The icon is gone, no resident protection on boot. Program no longer starts on boot. I readded avast to my registry to start at boot. I now can turn on resident protection from the user interface. However I still have no icon. The system started becoming unstable after the last program update. I didn’t think this had anything to do with avast at that time since I also downloaded and installed the latest IE6 updates. IE lockes up unexpectedly. Doesn’t matter what site. Task manager reports IE as not responding, also there is an process running. When I shut down IE this unknown process disappears. I restart IE and everything works again for awhile. I just upgraded my memory, this didn’t solve any problems. How do I go back to a previous version of the virus engine till someone fixes this problem? I noticed other people having trouble have posted on the board.

I’m running Win98 on a Gateway 2000 G6 233 Mhz with 288 MB RAM (2 x 128 MB, 1 x 32 MB DIMMS), ZoneAlarm Pro firewall, IE 6 with all service updates, Spybot S&D and Ad Aware 6. All scans are negative including Avast!

3

I have XP and started noticing conflicting trouble with my Sygate firewall. I startup a topic and, from that, it was suggested that I install again. So, I did that and I am unable to check whether or not the firewall conflict still exists — because, after a reboot, I see that I also do not have any icons or resident protection. That last update really messed things up. I actually managed to then install the previous version, but to no avail. The icons are still not visible and some remnants of the new version must be to blame.

I wonder if they’re checking into problems that people have reported.

4

Don’t wonder, but be sure that they check every single tiny issue that users reports. This is Alwil team if you haven’t noticed before. This is best forum in the world with best technical support you can even imagine…

Ask yourself, what other software house gives you online, forum and e-mail support for free ? No one ! And what’s best, they give you support for Home Edition which is totaly free. They don’t have to do that, but they like to help their users, so they help us at no cost…

…so better be little bit more patient, and please don’t jump with conclusions… just read those thousands and thousands threads, posts and replies, and you’ll see that they are always here for all of us. We are family and we help each other, we don’t blame someone if anyone can’t give you answer right away… wait a little bit longer and you’ll see tons of answers. They can not read all new posts in the same time, so I hope you understand now little better.

Thanks and…

Cheers !

5

I was just posting because I thought it was worthwhile to mention that I had the same bootup/missing icon problem with XP (others had it with Win98).

I didn’t mean to ‘jump to a conclusion’; it was just a statement. ‘Wonder’ didn’t mean ‘doubt’ & I wasn’t giving up on them. “avast!” is and always has been great, saving me many times.

6

No problem at all… if you see that no one responds to your questions for a while, just PM someone from Alwil team, Igor or Vlk. I’m sure they will be happy to give you an answer…

By the way, I had exactly the same problem with Sygate after update, but Sygate was asking me only few times (for the same thing, though), and now everything works just great… no problems at all.

Cheers!

7

I uninstalled Avast! and then reinstalled the original version I downloaded (4.1.342). I updated the virus data base without trouble. I haven’t updated the program yet, and probably won’t till Avast post a solution or a new virus engine. I know the protection isn’t as good as it should be with the older engine but it works for now.