So admittedly this is kind of a silly/stupid situation, and probably doesn’t need any attention, but being a paranoid/curious individual, I thought I would ask just in case.
Yesterday I clicked the Install Firewall button on Avast Free AV like an idiot, even though I didn’t really want the firewall, thinking there would be another dialogue box or further screen to select some options instead of going right into the installation. With no other option to cancel the install, I just gave my computer a force restart about halfway through the process in order to cancel it. I restarted my computer and everything appeared to be good: No Avast firewall installed (with the option to still install if I want), and importantly the rest of Avast UI seems to be functioning (scans working, definitions updating, core shields up and running) and my Windows 10 firewall is still up and running and functioning and all that.
With all of that said, there is still that paranoid part of my brain that wonders if something could have been messed with or corrupted in the background during that cancelled/failed installation process of the firewall that may have lingering or “silent” effects on either Avast, the Windows firewall, or both. Like, if a half installation completed installation before an interruption could have messed with something or I have a half installed firewall or something that could cause issues that I’m just not seeing yet. I went through the Add/Remove components section just to make sure, and it didn’t have to remove anything. I’m very hesitant to uninstall and re-install Avast Free since the only time I did that a few months ago it broke my display drivers and I had to fix them.
So, basically what i’m asking is if anyone knows about potential issues that could be caused by what I described above, or if I have nothing to worry about since everything appears to be working properly like I said? I’m leaning towards “everything is okay”, but perhaps someone who knows the ins and outs of the Avast software can fill me in on something I don’t know.
Although the firewall isn’t active, there really isn’t any way to tell
what or how much of anything was changed on your system when you forced the restart.
If this were my system, I’d do a clean install of Avast.
That would remove everything and start of fresh. When you do the install,
select custom and only install those components you actually want.
After finding out that the back up /restore settings were broken several versions back,
I went ahead and screenshotted all the settings, grouping and naming them neatly, so that it’s easy to restore them based on those screenshots later.
I’m gonna keep those screenshots even after they fix the system, because who knows when it randomly breaks again.
I also did clean install for the first time in 3 years or so, but I installed previous version so I could restore settings and then I updated
Avast to 21.10 version.
Well, I reported several versions ago, that the restoring settings, while working for some of them, didn’t work for other user settings. So it already was half-broken several versions ago. Version 21.8 for example.
There’s also some sliders among various settings that aren’t affected by export/restore settings at all. I found out about it after a bit of extra testing.