Online Security signin w Firefox & repeated popup mesages re invlaid certificate

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Starting a few days ago I get repeated popups at only one site which I have used for years without any problems. The popup says:
avast! Free Virus
Avast Online Security could not be verifies for use with Firefox. Proceed with caution.
When this popup appears, the wheel on my mouse for scrolling up and down becomes partially disabled.
The site at which the popups occurs is:
www.physicsforums.com
I am using Firefox 40.0.1 with XP 5.1. The Firefox Add-ons Manager has the following entry:
Avast Online Security 10.2.0.187
This entry includes the following message:
Avast Online Security could not be verified for use with Firefox. Proceed with caution.
Here is one more oddity: When I disable Avast Online Security in Firefox, and restart Firefox, the popups at the physicsforums site remain.

2

I just installed Firefox on my new Toshiba laptop (Windows 8.1) and essentially got the same messages when I tried to open http://avast.anti-virusdownload.com/

3

See: https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=177057.0

4

Hi Asyn:

I get it that Firefox has some work to do about my problem. I would appreciate some advice about what I can do while waiting for Firefox to do what they need to do. Here are some possibilites I’ve consideed, all of which I have reservations about.

  1. Remove the avast add-on from Firefox. I do not understand why disabling it failed to change behavior. I also do not understand why this affects only one site.
  2. Try to find an alternative to the avast add-on that works OK with Firefox.
  3. Try to find a manual way ti fix the sign-in of the Avast add-on.

Regards,
Buzz

5

You could try another browser.

6

Hi Asyn:

Good idea. I will try that.

Regards,
Buzz

7

Hi Asyn:

Chrome worked OK. However, I did not give up on Firefox.

After some trail and error experiments, my problem is now fixed. Unfortunately, I never did developed good lab practices, so I have no notes on what I did. However, I think the fix is likely to be some subset or combination of at most 4 things.

  1. I went to the Firefox site and “Refreshed” Firefox.

The made the Firefox behavior worse.

I checked on the Add-ons and found that most of the Extensions I used to have were gone. Fortunately I had made of list so

  1. I reinstall the missing extensions.

There were still some new bad behaviors, so

  1. I restored the most recent previously backed-up profile file:
    C:\Documents and Settings\…\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\tpg6u4kg.default

That seemed to fix all of the newer problems. Then

  1. I restored my bookmarks which I had backed-up more recently than the profile file.

I hope others who have had similar problems will find my experience helpful.

Regards,
Buzz

8

Good you got it fixed Buzz. Thanks for the feedback.