I have a problem with avast! Free flagging the winword.exe in Office 2000 as suspicious. If I manually scan the file, it comes up clean, but if I try to open it it gets moved to the chest. I’ve replaced it with a copy I believe is clean (it’s from a 2 year old backup of another machine), and the same happens. This occurred on avast 7.0.1466, I’ve upgraded to 8.0.1483 and there’s no change. Excluding the file from scans doesn’t stop it being flagged.
The OS is XP, SP3, up to date except I’m just running the latest windows update now. There is no other AV on the machine; it came with Norton but that was removed using the tools years ago.
I have reported the file for analysis, but has anyone else had problems?
I had something similar with Word from Office '97 a few days ago.
I opened a .doc file from a website, WORD opened in the Sandbox. I closed it and tried to see if I could find
any related messages - unable to find anyhting, so opened it again.
In the past, avast7 both winword.exe and excel.exe (office 97) were intercepted by the autosandbox, so I added them to the AutoSandbox exclusions and I haven’t had this issue crop up again even in avast 8 (even in on-demand scans).
I had this happening this morning too. The system couldn’t find the winword.exe file. I didn’t get the avast messag though
I retook to a restoring point from earlier this week and it was fine at first but then the avast notification cropped up that the file was compromised . We scanned the winword.exe file with different scanners but except that the date on the file had changed nothing seemed different. Now we have put an old winword.exe file from an old image and it seems to work.
I doubt you'll find any AV that doesn't have an occasional false positive. I'd rather that than an occasional missed virus!
Software is sufficiently complex, and malware sufficiently devious, that perfection isn't possible. I think avast does a good job.
My problem with Avast free began just after the upgrade to 8.0.1483 and is similar to those reported here, but affects the Word.doc files rather than the .exe file. After making changes to a word.doc file an attempt to save the file results in an error message that the file cannot be saved and, in several cases, corrupts the file and the backup so that the file is totaly lost. The error message reads, “Word cannot complete the save due to a file permission error.” If Avast antivirus is disabled the problem is gone. When re-enabled the problem returns. I will have no alternative but to remove Avast from my system if this problem cannot be solved immediately.