Is Avast the cause?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Recently I updated Avast to 4.1.342.

My audio production PC has an Audiophile 2496 Audio Card. Since the update I play my music/audio programs and after a few minutes my whole system locks up with audio stuttering. I cant even do ctrl-alt-del for resetting.

Well I did a clean install of XP, reinstalled Avast Free Edition and the rest of my programs: same thing happened again.

3rd Clean Install - same thing happened again.

I do not believe this to be a driver or hardware error. By narrowing down what I installed recently before the problem began was the recent program update of Avast.

Is it possible that this has a bug that would be causing such a wierd problem?

2

Does the problem happen if you don’t install avast?
Does the problem appear when you disable the avast! resident protection right after boot? (rightclick the blue icon and select “stop resident protection and exit”)

When you play music with avast, can you see in Task Monitor that some value of some process (memory usage, objects, …) is growing, for example?
How do you play the music, btw? (what software)
What drivers do you use to play - asio, mme…? (though I doubt this one would help us much - we don’t have this nice piece of hardware to test :().

3

Well, when I do a clean install, the first things I do is install ZoneAlarm and Avast then update them both online.

I keep two providers going; Internet Mail and Instant Messaging.

The software I use is Cubase SX and FL Studio 4.12 using the M-Audio Asio Drivers. The problem has even happened just listening to music in Winamp 5

4

Am not sure but, if you disable the avast! providers as Igor mentioned, does the problem go away? :wink:

5

I will try this. What I will do is disable the providers - see if that works then uninstall it to see if there is a problem.

I will report back.

6

I uninstalled the program, did some audio work for over 20 minutes and found no problems whatsover. I believe the problem is with the recent update…

7

Internet Mail and Instant Messaging providers only? I.e. the Standard Shield provider is stopped? Strange…
Can you please try to check with avast! installed, but stop even the other providers - especially Instant Messaging… could it be the one causing the troubles? Or just a mere presence of avast, with all its modules disabled, would cause the conflicts?
You may also try to stop the avast! services from the WinXP Control Panel temporarily… to see if it has any effect.

8

OOps it wasnt Avast at all! An hour later the problem started again without Avast! in the system… grrrr

9

I have taken Avast off of my computer, but still values in the registry that I cannot get out. I have trouble everytime I save picture as, avast is still slowing down the process even though I have manually deleted the avast folder! I KNOW it is avast, because my computer did NOT do this before I installed avast. I just cant delete some entries in the registry to rid my computer of the avast program. If I do not get instructions on how to do so, I will do system restore before avast. This program slows down my computer too much for what I use it for, I will use Avast on my other computer though, it is a great program.

10

You can try using the AvClear4, but I rather doubt it’s caused by avast… what version did you have before uninstalling - Home or Pro? (no matter of trial or not)