I’ve had a strange issue pop up recently. Getting to websites online would take a really long time and oftentimes would end with taking me to a mostly blank page that just said something to the effect of “forum.avast.com unexpectedly closed the connection.” Just insert the name of whatever website I was trying to get to.
I ran both Avast and Malwarebytes to determine if I had malware. They both came up empty. Playing around with the settings I discovered that if I turned the firewall off on Avast or set it to public that I would be able to get on the internet with no problems. This confused me since public should be more stringent protection, so why it works in public and not private I couldn’t understand. Concerned that something was wrong with my programs I used AvastClear and Malwarebytes tool (can’t recall the name) to do a clean uninstall of both programs. I also reset my router. After rebooting I only installed Avast back on my PC, because I saw some people mention having issues with both Avast and Malwarebytes running on their computer. I still have the same issue.
The only reason that I bring this up is concern. Nothing changed on my computer with either hardware of software to cause this to start happening. The fact that I don’t understand why it’s happening makes me think that something in my PC is compromised to such an extent that Avast is not functioning correctly even with a new install. While I can only confirm that the Firewall is acting up, it’s impossible to tell if any of the other systems aren’t working correctly either. Does anyone have any advice?