stevejrc: Yes, I believe you can give ashquick more arguments (separated by commas?).
The STARTUP arguments are scanning all sort of “auto-start” entries. You are right that some of the files may not be automatically started in fact, but it’s better to scan more than less. I think these “auto-start” entries also include the “App Paths” key (kind of Windows equivalent of the old DOS PATH environment variable) - that’s probably where the non-automatically started apps mostly are. However, I’d rather keep it this way - it’s really mostly “autostart” items, or the items that are rather close to “autostart”
gtaillandier: I think the boot-time scanner does not support these “special” areas (unlike ashquick) - as Technical already explained, IIRC.
My startup shortcut reads as follows without commas and works fine. I checked the items scanned and it was correct.
\ashQuick.exe" “*MEMORY” “*STARTUP”
This is cool, I also setup 3 desktop icons one same as above, one with “*MEMORY” and another “*STARTUP”.
I believe most AV’s dont offer memory block scanning, only programs in memory. AVAST does!!! which is cool, thats where the sqlslammer worm was found. And AVAST is just as quick as Panda was at scanning even on thorough scan and Panda never found sqlslammer (no block scan).
I recommend using the above in startup folder. ;D maybe a possible option in future versions?
Replacing *STRT-MEM-SHORT by *MEMORY and *STARTUP-SHORT may not be the best idea. The reason is the following: the *MEMORY parameter causes avast! to scan the operating memory of the computer (i.e. the true virtual memory). The *STRT-MEM-SHORT scans (besides the startup items) the modules loaded in memory (i.e. the corresponding files, not the real memory).
While the *MEMORY parameter may catch unknown (packed) variants of viruses that may not be detected on disk (they can be found since the packed file is already unpacked to memory), it may also fail to detect the viruses for which only a packed variant exists (and the VPS does not contain a signature for the unpacked code). Generally, avast! virus database is optimized (and checked) for the file detection - the “memory scan” is rather a special additional feature.
So, if you want a real thorough check of the memory/startup, I’d rather recommend using both the parameters *STRT-MEM-SHORTand*MEMORY together (or, *MEMORY, *MEMORY-SHORT and STARTUP for all the user accounts).
