My Avast icon in the taskbar continues to animate randomly, and even sometimes glitches between an O and an X state REALLY fast. I really only want to know when my computer is scanning and to stop the animation when it ISN’T scanning. It’s very confusing for me. Can this be looked into? If you need logs or anything I will try to provide them.
Hi, you can disable the animation in the settings.
I think he wants just to limit the animation to when it is scanning specific items. The problem is that AVAST is always scanning, it is not random, you’re getting all sorts of cookies and other crap sent to and from your PC all the time which AVAST needs to scan to be able to block. That is pretty much the point of it.
Personally I hate anything animated in my task bar/system tray and about the only thing I tolerate is a CPU temperature monitor and system monitor both of which are unobtrusive and actually useful. AVAST’s rotating icon tells you nothing except that it is doing something. I do not need to or want to know that, it is either doing the job it is there for in the way I want or it isn’t. The animation is just unnecessary decoration which may either comfort or worry the paranoid. Not sure which, me it just annoys. 
As Asyn describes AVAST thankfully provides the option to disabled the animation.
Thank you both. I have disabled the animation before but sometimes the orange icon catches my eye. So yes, I suppose disabling the animation or the icon altogether is the best solution.
Rather than disable it you can hide any icon very easily just by right clicking on the system tray notification area > Properties and using Customise to choose which icons you want, if any, to display. You can still have it set to provide notifications even without the icon.
Personally I don’t mind the un-animated AVAST icon sitting there its not as ugly and intrusive as some others I could name and it provides a simple confirmation your system is ‘secure’ if you hover over the icon. Of course you can also launch the full AVAST GUI just by single clicking on it too.
Icon animation uses resources. If you don’t want to see the icon animation, it makes more sense to turn it off and improve performance than
to simply hide it. Out of site, out of mind is still using additional resources.
Does hiding an icon really use up more resources than just disabling the animation.
As said I like to have the AVAST icon (non-animated) display but surely displaying an icon, animated or not, uses more graphics resources than if the icon was hidden? In either case the resources used must be practically irrelevant.
I would honestly prefer the icon only activate during manual or scheduled scans and not real-time protection but that is not an option. It simply states “Animate the icon when scanning”, but does not define what it’s"scanning" is. Is it checking for viruses? Is it in my browser detecting phishing links? Are my emails being checked? I wish the icon animation could expand its usefulness. If the program simply scans all the time, is there really a point to define that the animation indicates “scanning”?
I have also seen the animation skip or drop frames, which is even more annoying and eye-catching.