Avast webshield and Netlimiter 2 at war...

Hi guys!

By now I have several computers running Avast! Home and Netlimiter 2 for protection. Works pretty fine on all but one. The firefox of the ill one suddenly no longer manages to connect to the internet. If I turn of the web shield everything’s fine. If I no longer start netlimiter on startup (afaik simply killing the process won’t do due to its dll remaining active) the problem seems solved to. But the strange thing is, that if I re enable both it suddenly works. Is there probably something wrong in startup order? I read about setting a proxy to localhost in firefox but the problem remained unchanged. Of course netlimiter allows ashwebsv.exe communication in and out. I really don’t get it. Especially considering the fact that several other systems run perfectly with the same settings… ???
Any ideas?

Regards
illuminon

Which is your operational system?
Which is your firewall?
Any other security program that could interfere?
Is it Firefox 3? Any extension could be interfering?

Hmmm… this problem seems difficult to troubleshoot as other computers with the same configuration are running fine…

Vista pro is OS and netlimiter serves as firewall (it allows you to restrict bandwidth of processes to a certain degree or completely).
There is no other security program running. It is a basic office computer and has compared to my machine very few “critical” programs.
Firefox version is 2.0.0.15 (on all machines).

I know it’s strange. I cannot truly track the problem. There are only three things for sure:

  1. if both, webshield and netlimiter, are running on startup firefox can never access internet.
  2. if one of both is properly disabled everything works fine
  3. basically the computer is properly connected (windwos networking, avast! update)

A series of switching on and off of both services usually fixes the problem…

Can you activate logging in WebShield?

  1. Disable avast self-defense module: Program settings > Troubleshooting tab of settings.
  2. Edit \data\avast4.ini file with Notepad.
  3. Find the section [WebScanner]
  4. Add the line:
    EnableLogging=1
  5. Restart Web Shield in XP\Vista (terminate and start again) or whole PC in case of Win98
  6. Browse (trying to access some webpages)

The log file are \data\log\ashwebsv.log and ashwebsv.ws.
They would be accessible when WebShield is terminated again.
Post them here or send by mail to rypacek (at) asw.cz
After that, disable the logging to avoid a big log file.

Oh, enable the self-defense module again after that.

I followed your instructions very closely but something seems to be wrong…
The log files stay empty whatever I do. I deleted the existing logs to check the logging settings. As expected two new log files have been generated upon starting of webshield. Nevertheless they never contain any content… When does the writing process actually take place? What else could be wrong? ::slight_smile:

I’m not a programmer but rather a user like you. I think the process of writing the log will occur when WebShield actually scans something, i.e., you browse.