Avast scan hangs - XP SP2

First post so your help would be appreciated.

I used to have AVG and seemed to be getting on OK until tried to upgrade with new version. Had real bother taking AVG off and installed Avast. Boot scan worked brilliantly. Had Zonealarm at the time.

Tried to do a full scan and it kept hanging on a file c:system volume information. Looked at previous posts it it mentioned possibly problems with zonealarm. Took that off and initiated windows firewall. Then as suggested on other posts went into add/remove programs and selected repair on the options. Tried scan again - same again. Someone else suggested that you reduce the size of the file for system restores to about 1GB as it was at 13GB and this could be why the scan was getting stuck at the system volume file. Tried scan again - same again.

Someones expert help would be appreciated as I really like this software and would be annoyed to go through the whole process of changing again.

The only thing I haven’t tried is uninstalling the avast as when I did install I had zonealarm active. Does zonealarm hook into avast ? Would this be the next step to see if that works.

Many thanks in advance

try this :

  1. uninstall avast
  2. reboot
  3. download the avast uninstall utility at there website
  4. reboot in safe mode
  5. use the uninstall utility.after that reboot again in normal mode.
    6.download the latest home version of avast and install it.

Thanks for your advice and prompt reply. I will give this a go. Many thanks.

This is related: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=35575.msg299343#msg299343
The solution is to exclude tracking.log from scanning: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=36001.msg302489#msg302489

Thanks for that.

You’re welcome. Feel free to come back any time you need help or just to change experiences 8)
Oh, please, post back if you could solve the problem by that way or not.

Seems a daft question but how do I go about deleting this and where do I find it ?

You don’t delete anything, just exclude that file from scans to avoid this ZA tracking.log snarl-up.

So add tracking.log to the exclusions lists, e.g. copy and paste this into the two lists, ?:*\tracking.log (see below). The ? is for any drive letter (handy if you have more than one partition/drive) the *\ asterisk wildcard saves having to type the full path to the tracking.log.

Standard Shield, Customize, Advanced, Add and
Program Settings, Exclusions

I think the ‘exactly’ path will be:
C:\System Volume Information\tracking.log

Thank you thank you thank you !!! I followed all your advice and it has worked beautifully. Full scan took 19 mins.

Cheers

No problem, glad you have now bypassed the ZA hiccup in the avast scan.

You’re welcome. Feel free to come back any time you need help or just to change experiences 8)

You should to use only one antivirus soft at the same time. When you use more than one antivirus on your OS you may see different bugs

But the user removed the old one (AVG) and I think he’s using ZA free (without antivirus).

Yes - I don’t have AVG. I have never ran two anti-virus. I only have avast now. I had zonealarm firewall only before and again removed that and only run windows firewall now. Thanks

It wasn’t a bad decision to remove ZA firewall and re-enable the windows firewall you do need to have a firewall that is capable of blocking unauthorised outbound Internet Connections.

Windows XP’s firewall is better than no firewall but, it lulls you into a false sense of protection, it doesn’t provide outbound protection.

Whilst the windows XP firewall is usually good at keeping your ports stealthed (hidden) it provides no outbound protection and you should consider a third party firewall.

Hi

Would you advise say for example installing comodo and switching off the windows firewall ?

Your comments are much appreciated.

Many thanks

I haven’t used comodo firewall so I can’t speak from personal experience.

There are many forum members using comodo firewall without problem, it is however fairly busy/noisy as it also has a HIPS style element (defence+, I think it is called) that continually asks if it is OK for some program/process/file to do something. This for some people is a little overpowering.

The forum firewall discussion should guide you along with firewall test results link.

For some ones, it works great. For others, too many problems and interaction.
Defense+ at default settings shouldn’t be boring that much.
Windows firewall does not protect you against illegal outbound connections. But, indeed, they work as a inbound firewall very good.
It’s up to you to keep Comodo or just staying with Windows firewall.