Just upgraded and now have a load of Error 42100's

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I just upgraded to ver. 4.6.744, ran a bootscan and got a load of errors along the lines of:

File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\DirectShow.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}
File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\Encoding+library.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}
File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\Keyboard+and+remote+control.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}
File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\libmpeg2.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}
File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\mplayer.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}
File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\Prepare+baseclasses+library.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}
File E:\Program Files\AV\ffdshow\help\unrar.dll.html Error 42100 {Exception in polymorph viruses code.}

I see them in numerous program directories. I’m running an old PII with Windows 2000 Pro and never had this happen before with Avast. The only change I made was removing the pagefile.sys file from the “do not scan” in the Standard Shield Advanced option. Strangely enough, after rebooting, it’s back in the exclusion list with *.ini, *.txt, and *.log files.

How can I keep those files off of the exclusion list, and what do I do to avoid the 42100 error code?

2
  1. this is effectively only reporting files that it couldn’t scan and doesn’t mean that they are infected, although the error message is a little scary; an exception in a test/routine for polymorphic viruses, I think rather than code that might indicate a polymorphic virus.

I think that pagefile.sys may well be a default exclusion as this file can be huge 1GB or more in cases if this is set to 1.5 times RAM.

3

Strange i use ffdshow too and i never saw this before…

4

Does the problem persist even if you restart the computer…?

5

I just rebooted and performed another bootscan. This time everything was ok and there were no error codes. At first I thought it may have been a trial install of NOD32 or Kaspersky as a 2nd option to Avast. (I’ve uninstalled both). Many industry writers recommend having a 2nd AV program. Unfortunately those two don’t work well in tandem with another program (even when they’re not memory resident).

My conclusion is that after my most recent Avast program upgrade, instead of doing a bootscan after a 2nd re-boot, I performed the bootscan before Windows 2000 pro fully reloaded again after the upgrade. Hopefully, that was the reason for the Error 42100 all over the place.

I have several questions about the bootscan.

  1. Does this only scan the hard drives?
    2)Can it be set up to scan the registry?
  2. How do you set up a bootscan from the normal user interface? I can’t seem to find the option. I always have to switch to the simple user interface.
  3. Shouldn’t the pagefile.sys file be scanned on occasion?
6

Honestly, I don’t know… depends on what you’d want to scan. The scan occurs quite early in the boot process, so I’m not sure if it’d be possible to scan things like USB drives, network shares, …

I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “registry scan”, but I don’t think so.

Check the “Scheduler” folder / toolbar.

I don’t think so. This file is only used to temporarily store the content of memory (to be swapped out) and is not reused between restarts.