I had a similar issue yesterday when I installed avast for mac for the first time.
Check your syslog for errors. Mine were related to my hosts file. Avast didn’t like any host entries with underscores “_”. Once I commented them out, everything was fine.
The state of “cannot detect” happens when the shield should be running according to the configuration, but the shield does not seem running, or its PID file is missing.
Can you check the process “com.avast.proxy” is running (use e.g. Activity Monitor and select “All processes” in the combo)?
Can you check if the file /var/run/avast/proxy.pid exists and contains the right process ID?
If you start the GUI app. and it asks to repair, it generates a file /tmp/avastinstscript-[NUMBER].log. Can you provide it so we can see what the repair does? (There should be two files from about the same time corresponding to the repair, send both).
I deleted all lines in the hosts file. I rebooted, Avast seems to have “completely installed”. Files and processes mentioned above are now present.
Everything now seems to function normally. I have also provided the lines of my original hosts files, and again everything seems to work fine.
One thing to note. I am not an expert with the logs (and I did not look carefully, just quickly) but it seems to me that before I can make manipulation, when I tried to delete lines posing problems one to one , the problem still persisted on line 40 that was so different.
I convey to you even when the content of my hosts file. (please, no comment on it ;))
Agreed. I am using an ads block hosts file from mvps.org (http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt), which is where the underscores came from - there are about 10 records in it that incorrectly have underscores. other users who do the same will have similar issues until they comment out the offending lines.
I had the exact same problem and the avast process wasn’t running.
What I found was that first, I am using Snow Leopard. When Apple upgraded, they made some changes to the system and how it acts. To make a long story short, the host file contains 4 addresses to start with in everyone’s system. The last being
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
In most hosts files, people add after that last entry.
Therefore, you need to move it to the end. so, a hosts file example is:
Host Database
localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
A quick note, if you don’t want to waste time with terminal in order to edit the hosts file, download textwrangler from bare bones software (it was free). use the option to open a file, then in the pop-up enter
/etc/hosts
You can then move the fe80::1%lo0 localhost to the end and save. This will save you the hours I spent trying to fix this. Hope this helps.
Hello
I have exactly the same problem … have the solutions you offer above!
Explore what track to solve it?
I do not process “com.avast.proxy” running and when I try to disable the shield in the mail or web preferences I get an error that prevents me to do: (