I have been using Avast Home for more than two years. I don’t know if these two problems are related or not but they began at about the same time. 1) spontaneous crashes followed by system reboots. Always when i open a browser to go on the net. Happens when I use IE, Firefox, or Netscape. Sometimes I can surf for an hour and another time my system will crash as soon as I open the browser. Very frustrating. Which brings me to the second part of my message: When I run a scan it does not show any virus but leaves me with a long list of files that Avast was unable to scan. I have not seen this before and I wonder what this means. Should I be worried?
Thanks for any help that you can give me or at least to point me in the right direction. Regards Bill
Thanks for the reply and the reassurance. You are perfectly correct! I should have done a search. I guess we sometimes think that these problems only happen to us.
Thanks again, Bill
Many programs (usually security based ones) password protect their files for legitimate reasons such as AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy, there are others (and avast doesn’t know the password or have any way of using it even if it did know it).
When you run scans with the above programs and you delete harmful entries that they detect, a copy is kept (in quarantine/restore/backup) in case you need to reverse what you did. These are usually password protected, you should do some housekeeping and delete old backup/recovery/quarantine entries (older than two weeks or so), this will reduce the numbers of files that can’t be scanned.
By examining 1) the reason given by avast! for not being able to scan the files, 2) the location of the files, you can get an idea of what program they relate to.
Files that can’t be scanned are just that, not an indication they are suspicious/infected, just unable to be scanned.
