I thought I would give the screensaver a spin again, but it is still the same issue. The monitor never goes to standy/off, the settings are ignored. When the scan ends, it gets back to logon screen and will sit there forever. I have seen the issue pretty much ever since v5.0 and on many machines (from XP to W7). Things work perfectly fine with normal screensavers.
I’m not very familiar with power management features… can you tell me exactly
- what you set (and where ;))
- what was the expected behavior
- how the screensaver was started
1/ Well… normal power management settings via Control Panel (see screenshot below for W7)
2/ Expected behaviour: when the set time elapses, the screensaver stops and monitor goes to standy/sleep. This works for all screensavers but avast’s.
3/ Hmmm? Not sure what you ask here? ??? Just leaving the computer idle for specified time (10 minutes in my case).
I admit that I’ve never used it, or just let it run a few secs to see it in action. This said I wouldn’t be surprised if the scanning process associated with it would just tell the system that it’s not idle at all, explaining why the system, or not even just the monitor, won’t go into standby/off mode.
I’m not completely sure what would be the expected behavior of the scan, however… should it continue with the monitor off (which I guess should happen if the power management worked), or should it be interrupted (that would certainly require some additional code, if I could find out when the monitor is being turned off)?
Well, you confused me a bit with the logon screen - so I wanted to know if the screensaver was running under your usual account (and you set password on exit), or if it was a screensaver started from Windows logon screen - when no user is logged on yet.
I don’t think there’s any explicit code (in avast! - except for the boot-time scan where I remember it was added some time ago) that would tell the system it’s not idle… i.e. maybe it’s necessary to do the opposite, tell the system that it can turn off things? Would have to do some research 
Well, I wouldn’t mind either way as long as the monitor turns off. ;D But, nor really sure Windows internals make it possible to do this for screensaver (i.e., run with monitor in Standy/Off mode). Sounds counterintuitive at least. 
well I thought the expected behavior would be that the monitor would turn off after the scheduled time, and the scan keeps running, and guess what I just gave it a shot, scheduled the monitor to turn off after 1 minute, launched the Avast screen saver manually (preview), and that’s just what happened, the monitor turned off after one minute ;D so it works normally here
edit: it works as I described except the scan actually stops running (no hdd activity anymore) when the monitor turns off, probably better that way, and consistent with Windows screen saver behavior.
I must be special then. Never ever worked for me. ???
What I observe is that the screensaver tries to terminate after the set time has elapsed, which seems to get reported to Windows as a user activity - and you get to logon screen. And this behaviour just goes over and over again in a loop.
OK, that would make certain sense… if you have the “Loop scanning” option disabled?
Yes, disabled. (On that note, the naming of the option is really confusing, and lacks documentation.)
Hmm, seeing the code, probably not… the code waits for the real screensaver to finish, no matter if the scan finished or not.
Strange… well, I’ll try to experiment with it a bit, but probably not now, virus lab guys want some unpackers to be done
Btw, I suppose it doesn’t depend on the choice of the real screensaver for you, behaves all the same, right?
Yeah, no problem. This is really low priority. Thanks anyway.
Yup. Doesn’t matter which “real” screensaver is set.
funny thing, if you schedule the screen saver and the monitor switch to a same time, the screen saver won’t start and the monitor turns off - so far nothing special, that’s more than normal - but hdd activity seems to indicate that this time while the monitor is turned off the avast screen saver scan is running… and indeed when resuming the system from that not so “idle” state, you see Avast screen saver running briefly. Can be used as a trick to get the avast scan run with monitor turned off.
edit: oups… I don’t recommend doing it though, just tried that again, and when resuming the system, ie when the monitor turns back on, the scan apparently doesn’t stop ;D … no screen saver of course, but the corresponding scan definitely runs (hdd activity and avastsvc CPU load). I had to stop the service manually to stop that ;D
LOL. Looks like one more bug discovered. 