Floppy drive accessed when opening any file

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi,
Just installed Avast (program version 5.1.889). Every file I open from a USB external drive causes the internal floppy drive to be accessed/scanned for a few seconds.

There’s no disk in the floppy drive and it’s not an external device so I don’t know why it should keep accessing it.

Any ideas? Otherwise this is an excellent program! Thanks.

Edit: Appears to happen just for MP3 and archive (rar/zip) files. Other files open without this problem. It only started to happen after installing Avast.

2

I don’t understand this either as this doesn’t happen on my system, but I don’t have a floppy drive.

I don’t know what is accessing the floppy drive, but that is what is likely to cause the avast activity.

Now these two are classed as removable media and are loosely connected and they also share the same area in your File System Shield, Expert Settings, Scan when attaching, see image.

You can see if unchecking the arrowed option stops the avast activity, but I rather doubt it will stop the floppy drive being accessed, I really haven’t a clue why this might be happening, but avast responds to activity, it doesn’t initiate it.

Have you made any changes to your avast settings ?

3

Hi DavidR,
Still have the same problem I’m afraid. I’ve really only turned off the Mail and IM shields, otherwise no other drastic changes that I know of.

I unchecked both options and opened an MP3, and floppy was accessed. Then I disabled the shield altogether and opened an MP3 but the floppy is accessed as before.

I agree this is very weird!

Thanks.

4

There was a bug in the behavior shield in a previous version that invoked the floppy drive when accessing USB media.

A possible solution then would be to try uninstalling the Behavior shield and see if that solves it:

Control Panel > uninstall a program > avast > change > un-check the behavior shield

If that fixes it, then the bug is still there in some form or another.

I think there was a couple of threads about it, but here is one: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=68756.0

5

Thanks Scott I wasn’t aware of that.

6

Hi Scott,
Yes, thanks for that: uninstalling the Behaviour Shield fixed the issue - opening files on the USB no longer accesses the floppy drive.

However unfortunately it caused system stability problems afterwards: My PC kept freezing and I’ve had to hard-reboot a number of times. For example after uninstalling the shield, I clicked the option “Restart now” but this caused PC to hang. After a hard reboot, Windows Explorer wouldn’t appear. Another hard reboot fixed that. However then my PC would continuously hang seemingly at random events. For example, opening notepad stopped everything. Clicking the Settings button in Avast hung the PC too.

So unfortunately I’ve had to uninstall Avast for now. Even at the uninstall screen, clicking “Restart later” caused my PC to hang. I look forward to seeing a stable version released soon as my brief experience with the software was good before this issue!

Thanks.