Clean instalation in Windows XP PRO freezes PC

Hello friends.

First of all I’d like to thank the people of Avast for this great addition : Avast Business Free with cloud management. Its being used by us, a small not for profit association replacing our old choice Comodo Antivirus. Comodo was good but was slowing our (already old) computers a lot. We run mostly Windows XP PRO on computers with 9 years (Pentium D with 1GB ram and onboard graphics card with shared memory).

The reason I’m writting this is because We’re having some problems with the instalation of Avast Business Free (latest version) on our PCs.
I do instalation manually on the PC and in the end it will freeze the PC before I am able to press “Done” button.
I have to unplug the power to reboot the PC.
After this it apears in the cloud and I can activate it and assign a profile. It’ll take a while (15-30 minutes) to be activated.
After activation It asks for reboot.
After reboot I start to feel more problems:

  • After the login, the first thing I noticed is the desktop is weird and apears to have a folder opened instead of an image as desktop background. Am still reading a bit about this and I think it must have something to do with “Active desktop” being active. Need help if possible and I’ll also post any findings.
  • Also I’m no longer able to print to a network printer nor can I access the “ports” tab on my printer properties. Need help on this since I can’t find any information on this.

Regading the post-instalation freeze, the PC responds to ping but RPC comands no longer work (“shutdown -r” would solve). We also have VNC installed and this stops working after the freeze. RDP also does not work after the freeze.

Any help is welcomed.

Thanks.
MB

Hi Manuel, welcome to the forums

A lot of questions here in your post! Maybe I can get the ball rolling…

Yes, definitely sounds like active desktop. It was very problematic in the Windows 98 days, which prompts me to ask what version of Internet Explorer you have? You should where possible be running IE8 and have Service Pack 3 for Windows XP too. Can you verify these please? You can disable active desktop http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000593.htm

Same goes for printer drivers. Can you verify you have the latest drivers for you printer (make and model might help too). From the sounds of your other issues, it could be just the port being blocked to communicate with the printer that causes the tab to stick. So solving the printing issues should also solve that.

Hello.

Thanks for the fast reply.

All our computers have Windows XP Pro Sp3 and IE8 with all updates available. I’ve setup a test machine from metal to clean instalation and updates.

Problem 1: computer freeze after install avast antivirus: still happens even when computer has been finished installed and all updates done. Instead of doing it by pushing a network script I need to go over to the computer because It will freeze and I can’t even VNC/RDP to it.

Problem 2 SOLVED: active desktop problem: From your idea I’ve searched a bit more to do it automagically :slight_smile: I’ve disabled the active desktop by adding start scripts with this information (http://daydull.com/tips-tutorials/how-to-disable-active-desktop-in-windows-xp-including-registry-method/). Local GPO with bat calling a reg file.
BAT

@echo off
reg import c:\path\to\file.reg

Problem 3: unable to print and printer port tab crashs explorer.exe: I have the latest drivers for the 2 printers we use Utax P-4035i and a Panasonic DP-180, both printers are network accessed.

Still doing tests will post updates. Any idea is welcomed.

Thanks.

I didn’t encounter your specific issues, I ended up having to pull Avast Business Cloud from all the three XP computers I was testing on. There were a few issues, but the biggest was that the longer it was installed, the slower the computer got. Very strange. After removing, the computers behaved normally. Did not see the issue on my Windows 7 test computer.

Freezes are nasty to sort out. Can I be clear, your fresh install test had no additional unnecessary 3rd party drivers (like the printer/display) installed? Could you tell us if all the hardware is basically the same or different vendors on affected machines (eg all the motherboards are the same)?

If it stops at exactly the same place every time on a vanilla XP install on common hardware without joining domains or anything, it kinda suggests a hardware compatibility problem rather than hardware fault. Its very likely the install is not completing properly and therefore causing all your other problems.

Nice. 8) Active Desktop is basically useless and even Microsoft dumped it. It will also help your machines out resource-wise.

I probably wouldn’t even try to bother solving this until Problem 1 is sorted. :slight_smile: I’d strongly suggest logging a ticket/chat with support, since it isn’t an isolated incident in your environment. In particular, I’d ask if you should try an earlier Avast build which I think doesn’t have any of the new NG or Secure Virtual Machine stuff in it to test.

From other posts that I have read, XP and Avast don’t always play out of the box, as @PCSFL experienced. May I ask why you haven’t upgraded from XP now it is end-of-life (apart from the old hardware)?

Hello Friends, Thanks for the replies.

The PCs are all the same (HP DX2200) and the 3rd party installs I do are only the ATI Radeon XPress 200 driver (on-board graphics).
I also tried the install on a VM with similar characteristics (Virtualbox 5.0 running on ubuntu 15.04) and after the instalation the VM froze too.
I’ll try doing a clean install without the ATI drivers and see if there is diferences.

The PCs are on workgroup, no domain and we still have Windows XP because its OEM and we don’t have money to buy new machines neither to upgrade.

PROBLEM 3: Update: When reboot if I enter as administrator I can access the printer properties (ports) page fine. Then if I enter as user (limited) and try to do the same (or print) the window freezes and to close it the explorer crashes and I can now longer access the printer. If I don’t reboot and enter in administrator I can no longer print nor access the properties (ports) page of the printer. After a rebbot it all works in admin until I enter as user.

I’ll keep you posted on updates.

Best regards,
MB

Ahh the HP dx series, I remember them well. They look like decent boxes for their age.

If this installer hang happens under Virtualbox too, and affects all other machines, it sounds maybe like a problem with the installer. How did you obtain it? I would suggest going to the cloud and add new device, from there choose “Download this installer onto this device” and select customise installer. I use the Full and Interactive installer. Uninstall and use avastclear if your problems dont go away (http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility). Please also verify Avast Business version you have trying to install, latest is 10.3.2508