Corsair mouse custom button commands stopped working

I’ve been using the Avast free AV software for at least 3 years now with no problems, but as of the September 2021 update, the extra buttons on my 8-button Corsair mouse have stopped working. I know for certain that Avast is the cause of this problem. After rebooting a few times to see if that would fix the issue (it didn’t), I uninstalled the Avast software, and voila: the mouse started working properly again. I reinstalled Avast: the extra mouse buttons stopped functioning again. I removed Avast again and the mouse worked fine again. (I also noted that AVG free and Avast One Essential also cause the same problem with the mouse.)

The mouse uses the Corsair Utility Engine v1.14.43 to map the buttons, which is the latest version for my Windows 7 system.

I created exceptions in Avast for the Corsair software folders, including the AppData folder where the configuration file is stored. Didn’t help.

I set Avast to delayed startup, hoping it wouldn’t interfere with the loading of the Corsair software startup. Didn’t help.

I uninstalled/reinstalled my Corsair Utility Engine software. Didn’t help.

I’ve run out of ideas on what to do, other than switching to another antivirus program.

Are there any known solutions to this type of problem? I couldn’t find anything similar in these forum archives.

  1. Enable debug logging (Menu > Settings > General > Troubleshooting > Enable debug logging) and reproduce the issue.
  2. Follow instructions: https://support.avast.com/article/33/ and post the File-ID or name of the Support-File here afterwards.

I fixed the problem…by switching to another antivirus program.

I wouldn’t consider that a fix.

Avast software created the problem; removing the software solved the problem.

I’ve appreciated this decent antivirus program for three years, but lately it has caused me a lot of aggravation. At some point in the last couple of months, an update wiped out my accrued list of exceptions in the settings without me noticing. I wondered why I was suddenly getting prompted by Avast about a number of programs and scripts that I have been running on my system forever. One system utility that I used (Taskbar Tweaker) mysteriously stopped functioning. Turns out that Avast was quietly deleting the executable on Windows startup (multiple times, after I reinstalled the utility multiple times), presumably because it was incorrectly flagged as malware. And after I finally realized that my exceptions list was blank, I could not even restore the settings from a backed up file for whatever reason.

Then this Corsair mouse problem happened…

I decided that I was spending way too much time troubleshooting the recent iterations of this antivirus program. I figured it was a good time to test other antivirus programs. Maybe I’ll end up circling back to Avast in the future if I discover the grass isn’t greener in the other yards.