Avast Premium Security suddenly blocked Photoshop Elements

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

… and even though I unblocked it it still won’t start. This is licensed software that I have been using more or less daily since I installed it in 2015 on this machine. I used it most recently last night. Today it wouldn’t start. I played a hunch and looked in Avast Premium Security settings and found PE had been blocked (twice) on grounds of trying to access passwords. I unblocked both blocks and it still won’t start. Here are the possible explanations as I see them, in order of plausibility, given the facts:

  • false positive as the result of a recent Avast Premium Security update
  • true positive as a result of Adobe suddenly getting into data harvesting
  • true positive caused by Photoshop Elements suddenly compromised by unidentified malware

Obviously I don’t want to use it if it is either of the last two, but this is not the first time I have had Avast Premium Security block software that was surely false positive (whilst unblocking PE, I discovered I still have Scripted Diagnostics Native Host blocked and that’s part of Windows). Which is why I unblocked it. But it still won’t start!

How do I establish the explanation and how do I get my software working again?

2

This is what happened when I tried to fire up Avast Cleanup Premium to try and see if it might be implicated. Looking even more likely to be an Avast cockup, I’d say. So all I need is some help to fix it, please. Unless a restart magically fixes everything. Let’s see …

3

Report a false positive (select file or website)
https://www.avast.com/false-positive-file-form.php

4

Thanks for that link, bob3160. Photoshop Elements was working again after a restart, so it sure looks like my two Avast products got something wrong, and I reported it as a false positive file. It’s not the file that’s false positive, though, is it? It’s the behaviour it was alleged to have exhibited. So I had to make that clear in the description. I find it hard to understand how accessing sensitive information could be falsely observed!

5

It may very well have been because a restart was required.

An update of some kind.