After running the AV all of my Icons are disappearing from my desktop and so are the folders marking in the My Documents or other folder on desktop.
Any way to remedy the problem?
On comp. re-start everything turns back normal.
PS Oper. system Pent III - Windows 98SE = No firewalls - Just Spybot & Avast!
Hi, welcome to the forum. That’s pretty common with 98 and ME. It’s a resource issue. Actually a poor handling of resources by win98. I use win 98se also, but it’s rare for that to happen on this system. I don’t have much running a startup and have almost 400mb ram.
Post your system specs and maybe some suggestions can be made.
Oldman thanks for your quick reply.
I too don’t have much running a startup and have only 256mb ram.
Mind you, I don’t run the AV-check daily, but it would be nice if I could avoid the inconvenience of having to restart my computer b’cause of the missing icons.
Everyone should use a firewall. On my website I have a download link to Kerio 2.1.5. It’s low on RAM use and has outbound protection as well as inbound.
rdmaloyjr : thanks for your reply. Firewall is not my problem at the moment as I am dealing with an issue created by Avast AV in eliminating icons on desktop.
Firewall is build in with my server and so far I don’t have any problem.
In addition I’ m running NoScript to block unwanted java scripts.
Hoping you could give me an idea as per resolving AV problem
Thanks
Well, avast shouldn’t be removing icons or adding links to folders… Seems malware behavior.
I suggest (some of the tools won’t be available for Windows 98):
Clean your temporary files.
Schedule a boot time scanning with avast with archive scanning turned on. If avast does not detect it, you can try DrWeb CureIT! instead.
Use SUPERantispyware, MBAM or Spyware Terminator to scan for spywares and trojans. If any infection is detected, better and safer is send the file to Quarantine than to simple delete than.
I do not have any malware on one my systems running the closely related WinMe operating system. As many users of Win 98 and WinMe have previously reported in this forum the loss of icons on limited resource systems after a full scan is commonplace.
Is there a fix - typically no.
Will there be any effort by avast to help? Not really - the reality of the world is that the Win98 and WinME users are a rapidly dwindling part of the avast community, avast makes very little money from these users so there is no incentive.
My old computer is still on W98SE and I had the same problem with it years ago until I added more ram. The problem is, as others have suggested, the scan taxes the low amount of ram too much and Windows stops running the least needed services. The icons are the first to go. Like you, I only had 256mb in the beginning but I had 2 ram sticks in an even older dead computer (bad motherboard) that were still good. So, I added the 256mb stick first and that cured the icon problem. I later added the 128mb stick for a total of 640mb but I don’t think you need go that far…
alanrf: thanks for your explanation that confirms my uneducated theory (not enough ram)
I do realize that Avast cannot waste resources in fixing glitches with oldish OS like win98 or ME. It’s just a matter to accept the idea and live with it.
Thanks to the forum for the attention to this issue and for the explanation provided.