Forced Program Updates

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Thank you for allowing me to speak. If my words offend, I apologize.

I landed in the forum on an old thread (closed ~2012-2014) about this same topic because of the grief I went thru while tracking down a problem.

I’ve been with the Avast! crew since, well, since it was a ‘four guys coding in a basement’ crew. And yeah, there’ve been some hiccups along the way with rolling out new releases. But for me they were relatively minor hiccups; a small price to pay for ‘Always free for home/personal use.’, because those four guys wanted to reduce or prevent the spread of bad code - ‘malware’ wasn’t in the lexicon yet.

I’m not going to flog the dead horse of “My computer, my choice when to update.”, though I think it valid. My own issues stem from those forced updates that killed a totally separate application. An application that had been running fat, dumb and happy for years; and ran equally-well on two different OS’s - XP Pro SP3 & Windows 7 SP1… until that manual update setting was ignored.

Up until about a year ago I had operated a one-person SOHO. That no-longer-functioning application caused me to lose a significant pile of income; significant to me anyway.

Since that time I had cause to repave my system back to it’s ‘nearly new’ state: OS, service pack, security updates, 3rd party applications, etc.; and everything worked as expected for about a week, when that forced update came calling.

Being retired, I now had the time and attention-span to actually debug this silliness. Imagine my chagrin when I traced the app’s program-flow and found it’s last actions were to launch a new thread and call into an Avast dll, at which point the instance either locked, or went into a race state, with dueling threads. Checked About Avast and well hello, new version! That’s where I stopped digging. Completely uninstall Avast and all is right with the world again.

Please don’t misunderstand. In no way do I expect Avast to maintain 100% compatibility with every version of every application, on every version of every OS.

But I can’t help wondering how many other people have had one single app die for no apparent reason, no error messages, no other system problems; then fiddle with it for a while, and just give up with “Oh well, it’s a mystery.”

All because “Manual Update” didn’t really mean anything.

All My Kin, thank you for allowing me to speak. I am finished.

2

You are pushing at an open door here. I have no complaint about Avast as a program (well, not much) but if only sites would tell us what they are doing and why. and perhaps the possible consequences.

I have just had to reinstall a different version of skype because they didn’t let people know what was happening…and I had automatic updates turned off for that.

3

@ Bobby Richardson
Program updates, have for some time have been set to Auto update in the same way as the VPS updates.

The settings for program updates can be modified and set back to Ask and future program updates would honour that setting. I’m using my windows 10 laptop for this post and that is still using 12.3.2280, if I look at Avast Settings > Update it tells me that there is a new version of the program is available, version 17.2.2288.

As far as I’m aware it may have been early 12.x that this changed, but why you got 17,x installed with the settings still at manual is beyond my understanding of what was meant to have happened.

4

I get you. Just yesterday I dredged the 'net & found an offline-installer for v11.~ and, with the network cable unplugged, installed & configured it to Manual Update on every setting I could find. Then, cable still unplugged, clicked the update buttons. Then I wrote down the update server names that were displayed.

Then I edited my ‘hosts’ file and pointed the reported update servers to localhost (127.0.0.1); basically to an IP black hole if you’re not running a web server on your computer.

Then tested the application under observation and everything worked normally.

With all that finished, I rebooted my system, plugged in the network cable, and updated VPS. Download went normally. Then tried updating the Program and behaviour was as expected - connection timed-out, no update.

Had to reboot about 2 hours ago and hello v17.2!

But thanks to another post in re Paint Shop Pro 9, in which the author suggested disabling Avast’s Self-Defense Module, I am able to continue using Avast and the other program. An unsatisfying work-around because I believe self-defense to be A Good Thing.

I want to be charitable and theorize that Avast’s Emergency Update Service considers an old version to be an emergency situation, and uses a non-obvious server to get the updates at it’s first opportunity.

But the suspicious former private investigator in me wants to install Wireshark and go packet-sniffing to find out just exactly where ‘Home’ is, when the EUS phones home.

My thanks to you and Avast472 for your replies.

5

You’re welcome.

The Avast Emergency Update Service, is there to resolve any issues that can’t otherwise be resolved by the normal update functions. Commonly this would be resolving a problem with a bad VPS update (update function broken) so it can’t be resolved by issuing a new VPS update. But there may be other instances that it could be used for, but I don’t know if updating an old version of the program would be one of those.

The Avast Emergency Update I believe is a scheduled task, I can’t see it in WinPatrol, but I can see it in Control Panel Scheduled Tasks on this win10 laptop, so could be a hidden one. I can see it in WinPatrol on my XP Pro system. But the only one I can see on my win7 netbook is for Avast Settings Backup ???

6

To make it clear Bobby:

You downloaded and installed v11 when offline yesterday, set the program update to manual. You did this while you were offline… You then connected to the Internet and updated the Virus definitions (not the Program update) and rebooted. Avast then became v17.2?