My system got irrecoverably blown away by an NVidia driver problem - did a reinstall of 64-bit Windows 8 then and upgrade to 8.1 (both of which went remarkably smoothly though recovering user files was a pain and I still have to recover various programs). ONE of the programs I tried to reinstall was Avast anti-virus Free. That installation gave not a peep of protest during and even after it restarted the PC, however when the OS came back up and I ran Process Explorer there were no Avast processes running. Clicking on the desktop icon Avast had installed gave an error dialog about a side by side configuration error. Looking at an Event Log showed an error:
Activation context generation failed for "C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\asOutExt64.dll". Dependent Assembly Avast.VC110.CRT,processorArchitecture="amd64",publicKeyToken="2036b14a11e83e4a",type="win32",version="11.0.60610.1" could not be found. Please use sxstrace.exe for detailed diagnosis.
Attempts at tracking down a fix for this has proven fruitless - I even installed about 6 different versions of Visual C++ Redistributables to see if that would have any effect - nope.
Interestingly, I could not UNinstall Avast via the normal method - that, too, gave the same error. I used AvastClear (or whatever it’s called from Avast) to do the removal and now am simply using Windows Defender with MalwareBytes.
I see the “side by side” search string here in the forums returns numerous hits with none of them appearing to have been resolved either correctly or, at best, consistently with one another.
Installing visual c++ redistributables won’t help you because it have to be installed at special place which is our setup job.
Can you download last avast from avast.com and try to install it? If the problem remains, please find setup log (all logs from C:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Persistent Data\Avast\Logs) and send it to me at lavicka ( at ) avast.com.
Yeah, that certainly would have made my attempts at installing those fruitless! I mistakenly thought these types of things were installed in a special System Library location so anything that could get to them would find them there; in reaction to your quoted part I went over to the OpenOffice subfolders (installed after removing avast from my system) and see there are redistributables THERE - that seems wrong design, somehow, but I have no clue how Microsoft wants things (I’m used to Unix/Linux).
Can you download last avast from avast.com and try to install it?
Sure, I’ll do that shortly - however it should be noted that the problem was there WITH the “newest” downloadable available from surfing to downloads from the home Avast page, so I don’t think this effort will be fruitful - but I’ll certainly try in a moment - your reply is totally appreciated.
FYI - the failing Product Version from the Properties of the downloaded EXE is “9.0.2011.263”; the same “Product Version” is there for the just-now-downloaded soon-to-be-tried copy that was downloaded from “Download.com” by simply clicking on Avast’s “Download” links until I finally got to the final downloading spot. If that is NOT the correct version then I’ll need a direct link to the correct version and someone should fix the Download.com version…
Again, I went to Avast, clicked on two or three consecutive green “Download” buttons, finally arriving at Download.com where an actual download occurred.
If the problem remains, please find setup log (all logs from C:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Persistent Data\Avast\Logs) and send it to me at lavicka ( at ) avast.com.
As noted - twice - in my previous reply, I simply followed Avast links to get to the downloaded setup file; if that file is what is broken, then Avast.com should not be pointing at it - it’s probably okay especially since…
you can download from here on the forum http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=142936.0
…I’ll would try that because, as expected, my re-attempt to install Avast again gave the same side-by-side error. However, the link in the thread you point at is to a file the same size as the one I just tried and also has the same “Product Version” information in its Properties so…I think I’ll wait til petr_matrix can look over the (actually quite mundane (!)) log file I’m about to send him.
Thanks for the reply anyway - always appreciated.
You might as well remove/delet all the c++ redistubutables you installed as well.
This is just a final followup to the original post to note that a VERY responsive Avast! person, Emanuel, interacted with me via email for much of the day and a successful installation of avast! resulted a few minutes ago. I totally appreciate his help as well as petr_matrix’s help that initially got the ball rolling
Though it is not totally clear (yet) what went wrong from A-to-Z with the various failing install attempts, I followed Emanuel’s instructions for manual removal of various registry information as well as manual installation of some (Redistributable C++ Library) files. In addition there was other avast! cruft left over in the Task Scheduler, for example, that I manually removed.
And finally, I changed from using the full install file method to the “online” install method. That may or may not be relevant given the other manual changes I had just made to the system per Emanuel’s direction.
In any case, Avast! is up and running apparently just fine at this time - the support of Avast! via Emanuel and petr_matrix (Petr) is truly appreciated.