In Win7 we see an exclamation mark and “No internet access” message on our network connection icon even though we do have internet access. This doesn’t seem like a big deal since most things seem to work, but office 2013 checks the status of this before even trying to connect to the internet. We’ve tracked the issue down to avast. After uninstalling avast the exclamation mark goes away and Office 2013 works normally, reinstalling and the issue is back. Anyone else seen anything similar or have suggestions.
Here is the fix for this.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=84506.msg686860#msg686860
Which was to enable the following:
Avast main GUI → Security → Web Shield → Settings → check “Scan traffic from well-known browser processes only”.
Then save, reboot and NCSI is working again as it should (yellow exclamation mark in Windows 7 disappears, and in Vista the internet globe appears).