On-Access Protection Control suddenly stops working

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I have Avast (the free version) installed on several computers here, and the last couple days I’ve been having problems with two of those installs. Both are on Windows XP Home systems, and neither have had any other kind of antivirus program ever installed on them – Avast was one of the first things I installed after first installing Windows.

Yesterday one of them suddenly had all the various “shields” in the On-Access Protection Control stop working, leaving a little red “not sign” on the system tray icon. If I go into the right-click menu, the options for Pause, Resume, or Stop the Providers are all greyed out. If I go into the On-Access Protection Control window to try to restart them (they are listed as being stopped), it tries to restart them but then brings up a dialog box saying “The requested resident task was not found” and below that “The operation could not be completed.” In the “less detail” version of the window, if I try to click on the main start button, nothing seems to happen. I switched the avast INI file database entry from ODBC to XML, and I can get the main scanner program to load up. I can also run the updates still, and it’s all up to date.

Then today, I had the same thing happen to another computer. The icon has the red “not sign” on it and none of the resident Shield functions would start. I was in the middle of reading email in Thunderbird (none of it had anything suspicious in it) and trying to follow a link to a page I knew was safe, which normally loads Firefox for me… this time nothing happened and Firefox would not load, and Thunderbird stopped responding. After a reboot, I found Avast no longer would load its protective services.

As I said above, there is no other antivirus program that could be conflicting, and my firewall program (Sygate Personal Firewall) has worked alongside Avast just fine for ages now. I have not changed anything on either system recently, nor have I been to any sites that I can think of which would sneak anything nasty in.

Anyone have any ideas what would cause the protection to suddenly stop working?

EDIT:

I restarted both systems and did a boot-time scan on both. On the system that started having problems yesterday, Avast found a minor file that was locked up out of the way (cleaned it anyway). On the other that this happened to today, it found nothing wrong whatsoever. And both systems have been cleaned of any spyware/malware/adware as of a few days ago.

But after finishing the scans and getting back into Windows, the icon had the little red “not sign” on it while everything loaded, then the icon returned to normal and it shows the resident protection providers are running again.

Now, while I’m ecstatic at having protection working again (I go to great lengths to keep my computers clean and working smoothly), it also GREATLY bugs me that I do not know why this happened. If I can know the why, then I can know how to either avoid or correct future occurances.

2

I suppose the several computers are in your home…

Yeah, if a problem in storage happens, the solution is what you’ve done.
Maybe you can install the last MDAC drivers from Microsoft.

Can you check how the 4 avast! services are set to load? (automatically or manually)

3

Yeah, these are home computers I have networked. As a bit of a hobby, I cobble together older parts into “new” computers whenever I upgrade and have enough left over, LOL

I recently ran Windows Update, and if the MDAC drivers weren’t included in there, I’ll have to track down which version I have and see if it needs updating.

And as for the services, the four I see in the list (avast! Antivirus, avast! iAVS4 Control Service, avast! Mail Scanner, avast! Web Scanner), the first three are set to automatic startup, and the Web Scanner is set to manual startup… but at present all four are started. This is the same on both computers. Which setting should these all be on?

4

Which MS Office version are you using?

No problems. avast! Mail Scanner could be manual too.

Back to your problem… do you bet in any other application, conflict, etc.?

5

I actually do not have MS Office installed on them. I use a freeware program that works better for me, 602PC Suite. Does much the same as Office, just less extra clutter it seems. But I’m guessing by your question that in not having MS Office installed, I would be lacking the latest MDAC drivers?

As far as I know, nothing else would be conflicting. I haven’t changed anything in the last few days that I could see effecting it, as the software was updated last a few days ago and ran fine until this happened. The only thing that really changed was EverQuest patched the game on Thursday, but as far as I know it never seems to effect anything outside its own program directory, and all I ever have to do is tell my Sygate Firewall to let the recently changed program executable have access to the network again. I’ll go through later and see if anyone on the official game forums have run into any problems with the newest version of the game client and Avast! not working together.

Beyond that, I don’t know what else could do it. I don’t normally run into something that out of the blue would suddenly change its behavior like that. Unless it might be a physical hardware problem, like memory failing? But then, to have it happen on back-to-back days on two different hardware configurations, one of them being only a few months old now? This is why it bugs me so much. ???

6

You’re right… MDAC is required by MS Office, so, without Office you could have some old MDAC drivers.
To update the Jet drivers (MDAC package) and see if it helps (http://www.microsoft.com/data or http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8F0A8DF6-4A21-4B43-BF53-14332EF092C9&displaylang=en). My version is MDAC 2.8 SP1 on Windows XP SP2.

There’s also an MDAC/Jet repair tool… http://www.macropool.com/en/download/mdac.html#Repair

I won’t bet on hardware… seems software or drivers trouble.