I am very angry and upset with this product - After installing the product I carried out a standard scan and it found no infections. Shortly afterwards, I found it had managed to corrupt/destroy several of my very important excel files - there may well be other things that are now corrupt as I haven’t gotten round to checking.
Has anyone else experienced this.
I’m uninstalling this product before it causes any more damage.
Well I have been using avast for over four and a half years and not once has it corrupted an xls file.
There should be no corruption simply by scanning the file, you don’t say if avast found any malware on the scan and if that was in an xls file. If this were a common occurrence that it would be all over the forums and that simply isn’t the case.
Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
I ask this because there is a certain AV that is an absolute pig to get rid of even after an uninstall and gets its hooks into everything like word and office documents. This revealed itself in that the user couldn’t open the document, this is down to driver conflicts from the old AV having not been removed.
avast does not destroy (even mess) Office files… maybe your old antivirus is crashing, maybe your computer is infected…
I didn’t have any previous anti-virus software running, the only protection i was using was the free Zone Alarm. When installing avast anti-virus it did say one if its components has a known conflict with Zone Alarm - but it then disables the conflicting component.
Yes, I can imagine if this was a common occurrence it would be all over the forums. Nevertheless, it has happened to me, I didn’t think to take backups, as I didn’t expect this thing to mess up my files!!! Arrgggggh!!!
That doesn’t answer the question, not having any other anti-virus software running is totally different. Installed but not running can have an impact as can remnants of a previously installed AV.
So I will ask again - Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
avast doesn’t have a problem with the free version of zone alarm as unlike the ZA pro version it doesn’t have the privacy module which can conflict with the Web Shield, which doesn’t scan your system but monitors http port 80 internet traffic.
swift1, like David said, the free ZoneAlarm has not even a problem with avast…
The problem is what are you calling corrupt/destroy Excel files? What exactly is happening?
I’ve just double-checked, I have Zone Alarm Pro version 7.0.470.000 (got confused with my other build). I hadn’t been using an anti-virus for some time and thought it about time I’d better get one installed. I’ve done a check to see what other anti-virus programs are installed - I’ve got Norton Security Scan and Spware Doctor installed - but none of these were/are running (spyware doctor was/is disabled and Norton security scan you have to invoke to run). think they got installed as part of the google pack I tried out at the beginning of the year.
There appears to be different problems with excel files. With one it cannot locate the file at all. When I rebooted xp the chkdsk went crazy finding all sorts of inconsistencies.
With another excel file, excel has said the file is corrupt but can try to recover the data which it appears to have done.
I think with the first excel file, the location of the file may have got screwed. I’m gonna try a few file recovery utils to see if I can recover the file.
With antivirus? If so, it will conflict with avast.
Are you using Windows 98? Which is your file system: FAT32 or NTFS?
Difficult to say… but both problems do not seem to be related with avast… avast is an antivirus and only manage infected files…
I have Zone Alarm Pro without the Anti-Virus
I’m running XP SP2 NTFS
I’m 100% sure this was caused by the Avast Anti-vrirus as nothing else had been installed - I was working with the excel files shortly before and tried to re-open them shortly afterwards. I had closed everything down to install the anti-virus.
Just noticed something else too, although I un-installed the product earlier on today, it appears elements of it are still present in terms of folders and worryingly as a process.
The main files .dlls and .exe appear to be still present in the main folder along with some sub-folders.
I manually tried to delete these files and got the error: ‘Access is denied’. Checked the process viewer and there is the ashServ.exe running! Tried to kill it and got the same error: ‘Access is denied’!!
There is warning.log file with contents:
05/10/2008 13:15:32 1223212532 SYSTEM 1584 Function setifaceUpdatePackages() has failed. Return code is 0x0000A410, dwRes is 00000000.
05/10/2008 21:32:54 1223242374 SYSTEM 1584 Function setifaceUpdatePackages() has failed. Return code is 0x0000A410, dwRes is 00000000.
avast can’t cause NTFS problems… the problem is between the file, Windows, your HDD…
Well, a thing that occur after another is not caused by the first thing… I mean I see no correlation… maybe I’m wrong.