If I stop all providers why then is ashServ.exe running?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I’m trying to find a way to stop Avast from running in the background for all types of scanning, except for scanning when I ask it to (right-clicking and scanning specific files or folders).

I was expecting that by stopping (not pausing) the Standard Shield and the Internet Mail Shield (the two that I have active on my system by default) there would be no program or file activity by Avast unless I manually scanned files. But ashServ.exe is continuously accessing the avast4.ini file every 4 seconds. I’m trying to find a way to stop this access since I don’t see any reason why Avast would need to do this after stopping its scanning modules.

Eventually I do turn on back the Standard Shield and the Internet Mail Shield and let them be active, but there are often times when I need to stop as many background programs as I can in order to run a very processor intensive program.

Any help on this? Thanks in advance.

2

One you can stop/terminate the providers, but the avast services aren’t unloaded I believe.

Or use the right click on the avast icon ‘Stop On-Access Protection’ ashServ.exe is the main element of avast, but checking Task Manager, Processes and you will see that there should be no CPU activity if you have terminated the providers.

Sort in alphabetic order and you will see all the ones beginning with ash (and or asw) together, so it should be easy to see if any CPU cycles are being used by avast! See image, this is my CPU usage and all providers (4) are enabled, but because I’m not scanning anything no CPU usage.

3

Just add the application/path to the exclusion list and Avast will not scan it.
No need to disable avast.

4

That’s what I see on my system too, zero CPU usage in the Task Manager. I also run a utility called File Monitor from sysinternals.com and it shows ashserv.exe continuously accessing the avast4.ini file even though all Avast modules are stopped.

I’m not an expert in these things so I don’t know exactly what all those accesses are for and whether they consume any CPU cycles, but I would think they do access the hard drive and if there’s a way to stop this background process I would.

Here’s a shot of the output of the File Monitor utility showing ashServ.exe. All those operations repeat every 4 seconds or so.

http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/9615/avast018vu.jpg

5

You can fully stop avast! and its services by these commands:


NET STOP "avast! Mail Scanner"
NET STOP "avast! Web Scanner"
NET STOP "avast! antivirus"

To start it again run commands in reverted order:


NET STOP "avast! antivirus"
NET STOP "avast! Web Scanner"
NET STOP "avast! Mail Scanner"