The other day I accidentally “Stopped Provider” Standard Shield, instead of Internet Mail, which I meant to. Well, ever since, I cannot re-start the Standard Shield. The “Resume Provider” is grayed out. In setup, Standard Shield is checked indeed, as if it is there; and indeed the tooltip in the system tray reads “3 providers total, 2 running”. Internet Mail and Instant Messaging are running, but how can I restart/resume Standard Shield? All 4 processes running: ashdisp.exe, ashmaisv.exe, ashserv.exe, aswupdsv.exe
I’ve tried repair, I’ve tried removing standard shield from setup, and then reenabling it in the setup, still, no success. 3 providers total, 2 running, and the Resume Provider grayed out.
Please, help! Is this an infection? a bug? Do I have to deinstall completely and reinstall? The question is how it happened?
WinXP-Pro-SP2 fully updated, avast Home 4.7 (4.7.10.98), outpost firewall (with all executables in avast folder, fully trusted)
After running the above rootkit tools if nothing is found try these.
If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode.
AVG anti-spyware or SUPERantispyware or Spyware Terminator.
I didn’t say I have an infection. I said that I, myself, stopped Standard Shield by accident, only not be able to bring it back (is this normal behaviour is one of my questions). I’ll try yous suggestions then; should I check if the problem goes away by deinstalling and reinstalling avast, first?
That’s strange, Unless you selected persist the change (not even sure if you get that choice on just stop versus terminate), the providers should start on reboot.
I’d suggest do the uninstall reinstall, using the avast removal utility which can be downloaded from
Standard Shield comes back ON after reboot… there isn’t an option to persist changes.
Or another antivirus is present and conflicting with avast, or you’re infected, or you need to repair avast installation.
Well, after all, my judgement is Bad UI. The context menu of the Avast icon in system tray provides the options for Pausing/ Resuming/ Stopping a Provider. A user would expect (at least me) to use these options after (s)he has stopped a provider. But it isn’t so. You have to go to On Access Protection Control | Details, in order to restart a Provider. My humble opinion, bad UI design, or perhaps I’m a stupid user.
Anyway, false alarm, everything OK. I had the chance to do a rootkit/malware check. Thank you all for your consideration