I’m running on Windows XP SP2 Home Edition, german version.
Was using Avast 4.7, it worked like a charm for over a year. Upgraded to 4.8 some days ago,
and am experiencing strange & disquieting behaviour ever since.
The avast!Zugriffscanner icon (blue ball with letter “a” in systray) gets a red circle after running for
a couple of minutes. Double clicking the red ball gives an error message about “the AAVM subsystem has
noticed an RPC error”.
Checking the services in services shows that the avast service is indeed reported as stopped.
Manually restarting does not help.
I’ve tried to uninstall Avast, downloaded a fresh version from the Web Site, re-installed, got myself
a fresh registration key, and tried again. Didn’t change a thing.
Checking the error log reveals the following errors - which to be honest don’t help me at all…
but maybe some of the powers out there can get some meaning from them?
17.04.2008 18:12:35 1208448755 SYSTEM 1404 AAVM - scanning error: Aavm: FetchGlobalCounters cannot open mapping - server DOWN???, 00000002.
17.04.2008 18:18:37 1208449117 Lumpi01 2584 Error in aswChestC: chestOpenList Error 1753.
17.04.2008 18:18:37 1208449117 Lumpi01 2584 aswChestInterface - Program error description: CChestListView::LoadFiles() chestOpenList() failed: 2147422219.
17.04.2008 18:18:40 1208449120 Lumpi01 2584 aswChestInterface - Program error description: CChestListView::OnCreate() !m_strErrorWnd.IsEmpty().
17.04.2008 18:57:26 1208451446 SYSTEM 1404 AAVM - scanning error: Aavm: FetchGlobalCounters cannot open mapping - server DOWN???, 00000002.
The system has automatic windows update enabled; i tried to manually do a Windows update, but
am getting errors from the Windows update site repeatably.
I feel at my wit’s end. Please help, I have no idea what is going on here.
Should this be a well known problem, and I just did not find it in the forum, please accept my
apologized in advance.
Thanks for any help!
All the best
W. Niederführ
(slightly dispaired right now )
Can you try to repair your installation?
Go to Control Panel > Add/Remove programs > avast! antivirus > Remove. Then choose Repair function in the popup window (Repair). You must be connected to the internet while repairing.
If this does not help, can you uninstall / boot / install / boot again?
Do you have any other antivirus installed in your computer?
Did you have in the past? Which one?
Do you use a firewall? Which one?
Also, take a look into Administrative Tools > Services
and see how the four avast services are set to start (automatically or manual).
I’ve uninstalled Avast via the control panel “classic mode” Software → remove.
Will try to switch the control panel to XP mode and see if I can repair the installation then.
No other antivirus software installed on this machine. Avast has been the only AV software
installed on this box ever.
Windows Firewall active, but settings have not been changed for quite a while.
Checking Administrative Tools → Services reveals:
avast Antivirus automatically
avast IAVS2 control automatically
avast Mail Scanner manual
avast Web Scanner manual
Forgot to tell you that this machine runs the home edition, sorry about that.
One forther observation: When trying to run a manual virus check, the systray icon seems to get the
red circle (RPC error) as soon as I hit the start triangle in the simple user interface…and the main program
silently exits.
Not sure if this is relevant to this case, but telling can’t hurt. (I hope)
Strange, RPC error is a very hard one… antivirus is not working…
Generally it’s due to an old antivirus bad uninstallation. Maybe something preinstalled in this machine (OEM).
I do believe you when you say that generally the RPC error is due to an old AV uninstall gone wrong.
However, this does not seem to apply here. I’ve run Avast 4.7 for over a year on this system with no
problems ever. The problem seems to somehow be related to the update to 4.8. Not that I understand
why…
None that I’ve noticed sofar. The interface silently exits.
There might be an entry in the Avast event log that could be related to the simple user interface exiting:
AAVM - scanning error: Aavm: FetchGlobalCounters cannot open mapping - server DOWN???, 00000002.
Any error message when running aswclear.exe?
None; I both tried running by double-clicking the EXE and by running it in a command line window.
Neither way gave me either a window nor an error message.
Version 4.8 definitively reacts different to leftovers of an old antivirus installation than version 4.7. This is what I could experience reading these forums.
But indeed, sorry to not being useful trying to help you…
I was not sure where to post this but since it has strong similarities I will post here.
Today one of the folks I support (Dell quad core, 2Gb system, Vista Ultimate SP1) experienced a problem shortly after startup.
This user has been running with avast 4.7 on this system for all the time since acquiring it and updated to avast 4.8.1169 on April 2nd. No incidents apparent to the user have been reported on avast in recent months.
I have just been looking at the logs. I can see nothing unusual in the setup log for the VPS 080417-0 update.
The error and warning logs are flooded with AAVM scanning errors. These errors start at the precise time that the avast update process records the update to VPS 080417-0 in the system event log. There are no avast errors recorded anywhere while avast is performing the first stages of updating VPS. I can see nothing unusual in the setup log for the VPS 080417-0 update.
I am sorry if I sounded like you were not helping me. This was definitely not intended! hanging head in shame
I wonder, though: How would I find out whether or not there are leftovers from any other AV installations?
Problem is: This is not my own machine, but my neighbor’s workstation… so I am not really in a situation to
tell for sure whether any other AV product has ever been installed on this system.
Do you know of any way to figure that out?
I try to avoid running into a situation where I would have to rebuild the entire machine in order to get avast
up and running again.
And once again, please accept my apologies for sounding unfriendly!
Take a look at “Serviwin” a free tool from Microsoft/System Internals.
This program requires no setup - you just run it.
In the “View” options take a look at all the Services running on your system (it will list the name of the company producing the service) and see if there any other antivirus company is named other than avast/Alwil.
Then switch the “View” option to “Drivers” and perform the same check for all the drivers installed in your system.
Finally in Start > Run > msconfig
go to the “Start” tab and take a look at the Startup programs loaded at the start of your system. Again look to see if the name of any antivirus other than avast appears.
I really hope that the remnant of an another antivirus is the cause of your problem since that is fairly easy to fix.
The problem I posted is not, I am reasonably sure, due to that but does have some symptoms like yours. There are differences though apart from the operating systems. The problem went away after a restart for the Vista system, only time will tell if it returns. Yours seems to be more persistent.
I’ve used ServiWin to check services and drivers; unfortunately I did not find relicts of an unsuccessful AV instalation. None of the drivers or services were tagged with the names of well-known AV products.
I have saved the list of both drivers and services in case you want to have a look at them; I can also provide you with the content
of the log directory.
To be on the save side, let me once more sune up the situation:
After something like 2 to 5 minutes of operation, the Avast systray icon “a” gets a red circle.
Double clicking the icon in this state gives an RPC error message.
The RPC error message appears as soon as a scan via the simple UI is started.
When checking the “avast! Antivirus” service state it is stopped. An sc query gives a WIN32_EXIT_CODE of 1067;
net helpmsg for that error code shows it to be a generec message about an unexpected program termination.
Restarting the service just repeats the above steps.
Repairing the Avast installation did not help.
Deinstalling & reinstallation did not help either. (A pre-boot scan executed as part of the installation process
did not reveal any viruses, btw)
I’ve saved all the material that I thought might be interesting for any support person looking into this.
I’ll upload the material to the ftp server if you indicate it’s okay for me to do so.
I will probably attempt to reset the PC to a former, working state later today. Of course, I am not sure whether or
not this will help, but it’s about the only idea I have right now. Still, I would love to understand who … or what …
the culprit is in this real strange situation.
)