No Taskbar icon

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I had a Trojan - Win32-Horst-BJ
Avast removed it.
I rescanned and there were no infections
I scanned with Superantispyware, Ewido, Spybot, Ad-Aware, A-squared and cleaned anything found- tracking cookies.
I don’t have a taskbar icon. I checked the Settings/Appearance and the Show Avast Tray Icon was checked.
I rebooted - no icon
I uninstalled and reinstalled Home version 4 (free) and rebooted- no icon
I checked the settings and rebooted - no icon.
Avast is not in Msconfig/Startup, nor in Code Stuff Starter.
I uninstalled Code Stuff Starter, and rebooted - no icon
I uninstalled and reinstalled Avast 4, and rebooted - no icon

I looked at the other thread about no icon which suggested puting a link to ashdisp.exe in the Startup menu.

I checked in the Avast folder and there is no such file.

  1. Am I still protected?
  2. Any suggestions?
2

  1. Yes, the avast icon, ashDisp.exe is an interface to the on-access scanners, etc. but, it doesn’t have any security function, so you should still be protected. What is running in task manager from avast, they start with ash or asw ?

  2. All I can suggest is to try a repair of avast. Add Remove programs, select ‘avast! Anti-Virus,’ click the Change/Remove button and scroll down to Repair, click next and follow. You need to be on-line to do this. Hopefully this will restore the missing ashdisp.exe.

And also check/monitor this topic http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=23877.0

3

Thanks for the reply and suggestions.

In Task Manager I have
ashMaisv.exe
ashServ.exe
aswUpdSv.exe
ashWebSv.exe

I have no Repair option, just Setup

There was no ashDisp.exe, so I copied and pasted the file from my slave drive to Avast! folder. Rebooted but still no icon.

When I manually run ashDisp.exe the icon appears in the tray. The definitions update rectangle appeared as usual. I rebooted, but the icon did not appear.

I went to msconfig | Startup and restored ashMaisv.exe and ASHWEBSV.exe from previous. I rebooted but no icon.

I think that the Win32-Horst-BJ Trojan that Avast! found was a false positive since it resided in my Canon iP4200 printer drivers folder. This has happened to others. I reinstalled my printer drivers to ensure that only the genuine ones were loaded.

I’ll keep checking to see if I get automatic updates.

I hope that this problem will be fixed.

4

Simply pasting the ashDisp.exe in the avast4 folder won’t make it run, so you need to do one of the following.

Check the option in the Appearance tab of Program Settings. Or Make a link to ashdisp.exe in your startup folder. Or Add the path to ashDisp.exe into a value named avast! in the Windows Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Or you can create a text file copy and paste the text inside the Code tag below (using notepad or your favourite text editor) save it in C:, call it ashDispRun.reg or any name but the file type must be .reg, this will create the registry key, reboot.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"avast!"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\ALWILS~1\\Avast4\\ashDisp.exe"
I went to msconfig | Startup and restored ashMaisv.exe and ASHWEBSV.exe from previous. I rebooted but no icon.
There shouldn't be any entry for either of these by default in MSconfig, Startup, so they shouldn't have been there previously (unless of course it is different if you aren't using XP). Even if you put them there they have nothing to do with ashDisp.exe, the avast icon.