Hmm, I’m not able to simulate the problem on my machine.
Also running SP2 build 2149 (the RC2 build).
Would you have any more instructions on how to reproduce it?
I have the firewall turned on. IE security settings are set to Medium (the default level).
Any ideas?
The MS folks seem to be willing to look at the problem but I first need to simulate it on our machines…
I couldn’t reproduce this again at this time, I’ve been testing all the regular software I use, including my software firewall, and the most I could do quickly was disable my firewall which actually does completely disable the firewall, except for the driver still in memory. If I have time later I will save my firewall config, uninstall it, and test this again as its getting late for me. I’m actually in the process of moving now, and I anticipate to be offline for a few days at least.
I had this problem on one of my machines running SP2.RC2. I’ve just finished re-installing XP Gold+SP2.RC2 on this machine and am waiting for the next virus (or program) update …
I mean, is this some kind of joke? How can such a problem “disappear”? I hope it will reappear – I mean I’d love to (positively) solve it before SP2 goes gold… Because updating is a vital part of avast and if the updater won’t work, we won’t be able to deliver a respective update (fix) to the customers…
I had this problem on one of my notebooks, while the other never had it. The one showing the problem was heavily used testing all sorts of setting (esp. firewall, policies) during SP2 betas. In fact, it had seen all releases made available by MS one after each other. My guess is, that although I always carefully tried to deinstall any previous version of SP2 before installing a new one, something might have gotten mixed up and somehow this had a negative effect on avast! update mechanism.
Matter of fact, I now have a clean install and everything, including avast!, is running as expected (while all prvious builds gave me some problems).
This happened on a clean install of XP Pro with sp2 rc2 #2149 already included in the image from MS, but it seems once I made the change to show avast.setup as an applications on the system it wasn’t possible to reproduce this problem.
Since you have access to all the builds, download the xp pro image with sp2 included, don’t install any software other than avast, and with the firewall enabled try it out again. Of coarse this would require that you are able to get a beta CD key from MS, which you likely already can do. I won’t have th time to image my current sp2 rc2 install, and do that right now so I’m just offering the suggestion.