Since the last major update (best estimate between March 11 and March 18) Paint Shop Pro 9 stopped working on my system. When I start it, it stalls before even the splash screen comes up and the process stays in some limbo, non-running state. The program is older (2004) but it has been running fine on XP, Vista, and Win 7 all along.
I’ve done a ton of testing… the final test being uninstalling Avast and seeing the program work again, then reinstalling Avast and finding it dead in the water. I even pulled out an old system with Avast from 2015 on it and it worked fine; after Avast was updated to the latest version, it stopped.
SO… I assume Avast is seeing some behavior it doesn’t like. How do I add this program to an exclusion list so that it can run again? I could not find any options to do that in the standard interface.
Thanks… looks like there’s no current solution and Avast doesn’t seem to give a hoot. Might be time to move to another product and dump this bloated mess.
Do we know when that will be? Until that time I have to run with Avast Self-Protection turned off, which strikes me as worse than no protection at all.
I’m also still waiting for Avast to fix the main interface window, which is too large and un-resizable to fit on the screen of my small netbook, and therefore the controls are inaccessible. It was said here that that would be “fixed in the next version”… but it still hasn’t happened.
Well the self-defence module isn’t a first line of defence or possible a second or even third line of defence. First line of defence is likely to be the web shield, second line of defence the file system shield. Then you may even have that third line of defence in the behaviour shield. Only then if whatever has got through al of those would the self-defence module have a role.
So this isn’t a case of “worse than no protection at all” but something at the end of a chain of events.
Asyn: THANK YOU for that tip. I can run the program now. I tried tweaking most everything else but it never occurred to me that Avast protecting itself would affect other programs. I don’t see how that correlates, but if it works, it works.
I am not sure about release date of Avast 17.4. but it is already in BETA stage, so I would say three weeks. We can also prepare a microupdate to fix this.
