Hi all
I’ve downloaded avast Home edition and installed it on my friends computer.
after a while my friend called me and told me he cant open his old and new word documents and instead of letters he can only see square zeros. he’s using windows xp and wetried open this document with word pad, notepad and to tell word to open it with older versions support.
I suspect avast cuz that’s the only thing i’ve installed on his computer and it happened on 2 of my friends computer.
I just hope it didn’t damaged the files!
what can i do?
If Word does not save correctly the documents (for instance, in CD-RW with on-the-fly writers like InCD from Nero or EasyCD from Roxio) you will see this…
avast does not ‘corrupt’ documents nor change file assotiations.
Did they run a full scan in their system?
I think they won’t find a virus but bad saved .doc files :-\
it can’t be bad saved documents because before we installed avast all of these files did work.
“Did they run a full scan in their system?
I think they won’t find a virus but bad saved .doc files”
You mean avast can locate bad saved document?
How is it possible that word dont save documents correctly? how can i fix it?
after a while my friend called me.....What has he done in that time? What did he changed? What did he removed/installed?
X_Dror
I think your barking up the wrong tree. I have the same operating system as your friend and Word works just fine. Avast! doesn’t change file associations. I don’t know what did but, it wasn’t Avast!
Ok, so it was not avast…
avast did not touch/change the doc files unless they were infected and you intentionally make (choose) avast to delete all macros of it. The Home version does not have an automated feature to do this job. If avast detect them, they should have order avast to do something…
No it cannot do it… only if avast cannot ‘read’ you should be warned (file error).
Disk errors, power failure, CDRW troubles… a lot of possibilities. None of them related to avast in my opinion.
To fix, run scandisk (right click the HDD icon, properties, tools, verify disk…)
yeah i tried to run checkdisk too, but it didn’t help.
i don’t know y but it happened to 2 people that after a day or two they clled me and told me they word documents doesn’t work well.
Can it be realted to the fact they use a hebrew version of word and a hebrew support with windows xp?
When you take the incorrectly displayed document and try to open it on another computer… does it work?
Displaying squares instead of characters, it looks like a font/charset problem. I guess it could be related to hebrew support somehow - but on the other hand, Word is quite well prepared for multilanguage support…
yes. these documents worked on my computer which have avast! installed and runing on it.
X_Dror
Then that should tell you that the file has not been tampered with or altered or you would not be able to open it on any machine.
The fault is on the other machine but, it’s not Avast! related.
that’s very weird…
because only after i installed avast it started to happen.
If you uninstall avast can you read that doc files corectly in your computer (or in the computer with this problem)?
i don’t know.
tomorrow i’m going there so i will let u know what hapeened.
thanks for the help so far! 
Try this.
Open word, go to help in the toolbar (at the top) and select detect and repair. This should fix any problems it may have.
Also you could try and update your microsoft office (word, excel ect) from the microsoft site here , just click the “Check for Updates” button thing when the page is open.
–lee
I’ve fixed the problem and i’m happy to say it was not Avast! ;D
For some reason my friend didn’t explained the problem properly and the problem was that when he tried to open the word document notepad have opened it instead of word, so he say weird writings with big square zeros.
So now i can know that i can trust avast again
Thanks fot the help everybody!!! 
X_Dror
So now i can know that i can trust avast againWe never had any doubts. Glad your friends problem is solved. :)
Changing file association could be a very common worm activity…
I suggest a full scanning and, if you found something, run avast! Cleaner
I will do that.
Thanks for the help!