Error when loading Avast Antivirus

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi All,
I installed Avast 4.8 Home and the resident part installed and fired up faultlessly.
What a brilliant little AV application.

After clicking on the desktop Avast Antivirus Icon and letting the memory scan complete, the help window and Control panel popped up. At the bottom of the help window there is a tick box to prevent this window appearing in future with an image below it.

Here is where the problem showed itself.
As soon as I clicked the tick box, a run time error popped up. This meant that I could not stop the help window popping up each time the program was loaded.

I searched this forum and google for a fix for this with no results.
But…
After carrying out a fix to cure a problem with another application, the Avast problem was also cured. It turned out to be an Internet explorer ActiveX Compatibility issue

The Fix
If you are confident to edit the registry, enter this value using regedit

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility{ADB880A6-D8FF-11CF-9377-00AA003B7A11}]
“Compatibility Flags”=dword:00000000

Otherwise, I have uploaded a reg file to do the same job. It can be downloaded from here
www.marmic.co.uk/IE_compat_fix.zip
Unzip it and double click the reg file to add the value to the registry

I hope this helps someone

2

Other way to fix it is changing (or adding) ShowHelpCheckList=1 value into the [Simple] section of avast4.ini file. More details here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=1647.msg10262#msg10262

3

Thanks for that Tech,

The main point for me is that the fault was not with Avast but with my setup. (Although Maybe Avast could have handled the error better) :wink:
I note that Avast is using ActiveX controls and for people that are having problems with Tick/checkboxes, this fix could probably solve the problem for them. Especially if they are using the same PC for programing with C or VB etc as I do.

Thanks again,
~Mike~

4

I’m not an expert on this… but I thought avast just uses scripts not ActiveX… Am I wrong?

5

avast! helps are in CHM format - they’re basically compressed HTML files.
To pass the “Don’t show again” checkbox state into the program, the underlying HtmlHelp OCX is used (in particular the TCard function)… so I guess you can say ActiveX interface is used in this particular case. I don’t think we can do anything to “handle the error” really… it’s the HtmlHelp which doesn’t work as expected on the system.

I always thought it’s just a bug in HtmlHelp (this problem appeared in one of Internet Explorer cumulative updates quite a long time ago - and it could be fixed by installing another update, downloadable from Microsoft - but it seems to be outdated right now, so it can’t be installed anymore).

So, this is indeed an interesting piece of information. Thanks!
Now, I would just like to know what exactly this compatibility flag changes :slight_smile: