We use the ADNM to roll out Avast to our LAN clients. We use group policies to redirect the My Documents folder to a share on a server. With all Avast providers enabled, if you attempt to save an MS Word or Excel document to these network shares, the machine will hang. The typical hang sequence is that Word/Excel stops responding, then the desktop, then all you can do is power cycle to get the machine back.
Saving text files does not exhibit this problem. This is possibly because Word/Excel use a multistep save process that includes creating a new temp file, deleting the old file, then renaming the temp file to the intended name. The problem also goes away if you turn off all Avast providers. I know that disabling the network shield doesn’t solve the issue, but I haven’t had time to test any of the other providers on their own.
We’re using the latest versions (as of September 13, 2006) of the avast client and adnm, and the vps and windows updates are fully updated as well.
I’ve seen posts with this exact same problem here on the boards, but haven’t seen anyone post a full resolution. In some cases people had said it was because they had the standard shield set to high sensitivity, but we are using the default of normal.
Please try adding the following to the Standard Shield’s exception list:
C:\Windows\CSC*
(to do this, double-clik the avast tray icon, click “Details >>”, double-click Standard Shield in the list on the left, go to the last (“Advanced”) page and insert the mask above.
It does appear to have resolved the issue with MS Word saving. I haven’t tested Excel yet, but I bet it’s fine too.
I’m a bit hesitant about this as a permanent workaround though, as won’t this stop Avast from virus scanning these files when the machines (in this case, laptops) aren’t connected to the network and are thus reading the files from the c:\windows\csc cache folder?
In any case, at least the computer isn’t hanging on save now, and for that I’m grateful for the tip. Guess I’ll have to put that exclusion in the custom ini settings on the ADNM console.
We were having random TMP files being created in network shared directories that contained Excel files accessed by our users. These files had randomly generated names and consisted of numbers and letters and did not exceed 8 characters total in most cases. Adding %windir%\CSC to the resident shield exclusions through ADNM prevented further creation of these TMP files. Thanks so much for the tip Vlk!