License does not work for user accounts

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I recently installed and registered avast! 4 Home on
my Windows XP system with SP2 applied.

Everything works fine under my account, which is
an administrator account. However, when logging in under
one of the two other user accounts on my PC, avast! 4
reports a missing license key and does not work.
It also tells me I need administrator privileges to enter a key.

Any ideas??

Karl

2

1] Remove Avast
2] Login as administrator (not as user with admin rights, that is something else)
3] Install Avast as ADMINISTRATOR.

3

Tried that. Same result, unfortunately.

Btw, when uninstalling, Avast does not remove its registry key,
and when installing again I got an error about insufficient
user rights. It turned out that even the Administrator account
could not overwrite the registry key that another Admin account
had created before. I had to give myself (Administrator) full permissions
to that key, then delete it, and then I could proceed installing.

Karl

4

And that’s the problem.

You or some very ill-behaved program must have tampered with the access rights to your registry.

Please delete the HKLM\SoftwareALWIL Software registry key, then open the properties of HKLM\Software, and ensure that

  • the Administrators group has full access granted
  • the SYSTEM account has full access granted
  • the Everyone (or Users) group has (at least) read access granted.

This must be set so that it is inheritable, i.e. all subkeys share the same settings.

After you do this change, you can reinstall avast and everything should work OK…

Thanks
Vlk

5

I’ll try that tonight.
Thanks for your advice.

Karl

6

You were right. My HKLM/Software key had full control for Everyone, and no other users specified. I went to another XP machine, inspected the
settings there and copied them over. That fixed the problem.
Must have been the virus I had recently (the only one I got in the
last two years, without running any AV software).

Btw, it was sufficient to install as a member of the Administrators
group, I did not have to use the exact Administrator account.

Thanks again,

Karl