I upgraded to 7.0.1407 recently. This version of Avast causes some games to crash shortly after they boot, or just outright causes a blue screen of death. If I disable the Avast Shields, the affected games run fine without issue.
First up: anyone got a clue as to what’s causing this?
Secondly: is there some way I can fix this without the duct tape sollution of disabeling Avast?
Running Windows XP SP3. No idea what other information is required for people to help me.
Thanks in advance.
Disable AutoSandbox. It’s the first one under the Additional Protection tab. Pretty useless if you ask me, and according to recent reports, it’s been sandboxing and crashing everything, from applications developed by the end users to games, to windows itself.
See if that helps.
did u see a red border around ur gaming screen before the BSOD? if yes, it is likely due to autosandbox
if it is due to autosandbox, u might want to add the games to the autosandbox exclusion before running the game for a temporary measure (see screenshot)
to solve the BSOD due to autosandbox sandboxing the game, please upload the dump files here for Avast! developers to see
Please try to be clearer when you provide an opinion, and when it is a factual or technical suggestion.
Autosandbox, at least for now, could be set to “ask”, and the game, or whichever executable, can be added to its exclusions if necessary. Users shouldn’t be “just disabling” (auto)sandbox. Saying it crashes is not understanding how it is working in avast 7. There are still improvements to be made, but it is NOT “crashing everything”.
Well, that’s not what the reports said. Personally I never used it and I don’t think I will be using it in the future. Especially not after the problems people had with it.
Thanks. The auto-sandbox feature was the culprit. After I disabled it the affected games ran fine without crashing or BSOD’ing. Problem solved (knocks on wood).
Now to clarify something:
There’s an option for “ask”. What are the specifics of that setting? I tried it and when I then run a game Avast didn’t ask me anything. Shouldn’t it be asking me to run the game’s executable in sandbox then?
Sure! … Er, what dump files exactly?
memory.dmp file found in Windows directory, then compress and upload to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming . Do that with an ftp client, or from Windows Explorer (that’s right, not IE, but WE). You can also password the archive if you want and send the password and the archive name to any of Avast developers found on these forums.
disabling autosandbox is overkill. Raygereio is not experiencing other problems other than his games and autosandbox.
excluding the game from sandboxing will solve his problem and still allow him to use it safely.
forums are filled with problems because the forum is meant to report issues which are preventing u from using the programme by large.
this is especially true when a new major version is released recently.
most importantly, his ‘sharing’ of his problem through the dump files he could provide to Avast! will help them improve the product 
at Raygereio: dun bother with the ask feature in autosandbox, it was mentioned that it will be removed as a feature soon. the reason given is that the autosandbox is purely for analysis if a programme is behaving maliciously, thus by right the option ‘open normally’ should suffice. however, currently the autosandbox is known to cause BSODs in a few system configurations, which has to be addressed