When Avast tried to auto update at boot time today it failed with “package is broken” message. I can not manually update either.
When I booted this morning, the first boot had problems. Appears one of my JMicron RAID SCSII drivers that control my optical drives flaked off for some reason. I rebooted without issue and ran WIN 7 hardware trouble shooter that said it fixed whatever was the issue. PC is fine now but Avast updating doesn’t work. Don’t see how this hardware issue could corrupt Avast but who knows.
Anyway to fix Avast short of uninstalling and re-installing?
Anyway to fix Avast short of uninstalling and re-installing?
¨avast repair and reboot
For a repair of avast. Windows, Add Remove programs, select ‘avast! Anti-Virus,’ click the Change/Remove button from the pop-up window, scroll down to Repair, click next and follow.
Yesterday I added the following exclusions to Avast’s memory scanner per a posting by Igor on it’s detecting of unencrypted signatures by Comodo and MBAM Pro.
*PROCESS*\cmdagent.exe
*PROCESS*\mbamservice.exe
Don’t see how these could have possibly corrupted Avast on a cold boot?
They wouldn’t have corrupted anything and certainly nothing related to the updates.
Try an Avast! Manual Virus Definitions Update Download - avast! Virus Definitions Update - Manual Download VPS Update (virus definitions, vpsupd.exe, approx 31MB). - Save the file to your hard disk, locate where you saved it and double click it and that should carry out the virus definitions update.
Note: Ignore the file name in the images of the page that is displayed after clicking the download link, they are for the main program, not for vpsupd.exe which will be downloaded.
Downloaded Avast 6 definitions as instructed and ran exe. Program says definitions are current and did not perform any updating from what I could tell.
Avast console shows my current defs are 110813-1 last updated on 8/13 5:17PM and they are out of date.
Since the repair log is showing prod-ais.vpx is the problem, I checked it out.
File has last modified today’s date with a time of approx. 5 AM. So obviously this file was downloaded or updated today. Might be from that manual virus def update attempt?
Anyway system restore has a version from my last system restore backup on 8/11. Should I try to restore that ver.?
Honestly I think system restore will probably just make it worse as there are often unforeseen consequences to system restore, were we have seen avast ending up needing to be reinstalled anyway.
So the next step would be a clean reinstall, if it doesn’t resolve itself as your VPS version is only -1 out, the latest being 110814-0.
I would leave it and see if another auto update occurs in the next few hours, if nothing by tomorrow, try a manual update from the avastUI, Maintenance section.
I didn’t mean a full system restore, just restore prod-ais.vpx.
I used to get virus def corruption all the time a few years back when I used Symantec Endpoint 11. Procedure then was to delete current def file and download a new one. I am surprised Avast doesn’t have a procedure to do this?
Well to start with you would fall foul to the avast self-defence module so you would have to disable that.
With the repair feature that normally works in resolving instances this, followed by the manual download if the full database; now if they don’t work then there is something a little more at issue than the defs. So the procedure you mentioned would at best be step one which you did.
If the normal Repair didn’t work, why not uninstall Avast, run the Clean Uninstall Utility from http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility under Windows Safe Mode and install anew the latest stable version of Avast?
After that, reboot and set Avast → Settings → Update → “Direct Connection (no proxy)”.
You may need to reboot again, and even wait for the next normal update after that so to really test if it works or not.
I don’t want to reinstall because I made a lot of configuration changes and as far as I can tell, Avast has no way to save those and reapply them automatically after a new installation.
If tomorrow manual download of the defs doesn’t fix the problem, looks like I will be forced to reinstall.
Yes, I agree. Just to be clear, I am not exactly suggesting to simply “reinstall”. I am suggesting first downloading the current stable version and the Clean Uninstall Utility, then uninstall using control panel, then in Windows Safe Mode use the clean utility and then in normal mode use the new setup just downloaded.
A simple reinstall may leave you some remnants. I am suggesting to try to “start anew”.
If after all that trouble, it still has some problems, then we may need to evaluate additional troubleshooting steps (like patches, or running some additional security tool for example).
BTW, after applying changes (like a manual full 38MB update of the VPS, or a new install of Avast), it may be a good idea to reboot, just in case.
Just rebooted and virus def auto update was sucessful! I might have found a bad guy on my PC but not sure. I have had problems with ping.exe mysteriously firing off by itself and trying to dial out. I found it lurking in prefetch and deleted it out of there. First boot after that delete and Avast virus def worked. A bit to coincidental for me.
Today on starting PC for the first time, Avast did auto update succesfully. Only strange thing was ever since I had installed Avast 6, the virus def update was almost instantaneous after my desktop appeared. This time it took about a minute or so for the Avast popup to appear stating the update occured. Might have something to do with the WIN 7 system fix I ran yesterday to correct the JMicro RAID boot issue I had. Perhaps WIN 7 changed the auto-startup order?