Problems with AVAST and MS OFFICE OUTLOOK 2003

Good afternoon,

I am have a problem with my Avast and MS Office Outlook 2003. Which is that AVAST is not scanning any emails.
I discovered this when I was sent, by my brother-in-law, a file which had a virus in it!! I saved this file to desktop and scanned it…AVAST found a virus. Normally AVAST scans my emails but not now and I don’t know for how long it hasn’t been scanning them!!!

In the taskbar (down by the date) I hover the mouse over that, it says that out of 8 providers 7 are running. And when I click it and click Outlook/Exchange it says “The provider is waiting for a subsystem to start”

For what it is worth, I have read in another thread about AVAST causing a crash and the helper asking about a error log in folder \ AVAST\DATA\LOG called UnpXXXX X being random numbers. I don’t have this but I do have several logs called UnpXXXXXXXXX.tmp.mdmp with dates from the 5th October 2006 to 5th May 2007 (again X being a random number)

I am running WINDOWS XP PRO SP2, AVAST version 4.7 Pro. Build: May 2007 (4.7.1001) Xtreme Toolkit ver 1.9.4.0 ActiveSkin ver 4.2.7.3 VPS file Comp date 11/05/2007 file version 000739-2

Other info:
Firewall ZoneAlarm Pro
AntiSpy Progs. AVG, Ad-aware, Spybot, Hijackthis

Not sure this is your problem, but I’ve been reading about the recent MS update causing problems with Outlook 2003.

See this post by ‘roundtrip’:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=28176.msg231172#msg231172

I just found this on two other forums…

Latest IE Update & SpywareBlaster = Outlook 2002 Problems?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18312763

IE7 and Outlook HTML e-mail create is slow
http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=11047

Outlook is scanning the entire listing of Restricted Sites (ZoneMap) entries in the registry on every single keystroke in HTML editing mode. This obviously causes an extreme slow-down of Outlook - to the point where editing messages in HTML mode can be nearly unusable.

Plain Text mode or suggestions noted in these links will solve this issue.

For information:
I use the following Explorers:
Microsoft Explorer 6 when I have to (about 5% of the time). To run online scans that only run with MSIE
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3 (about 80% of the time)
Opera 9.2 (about 5% of the time)
Torpark (about 10% of the time) to listen to some broadcasts from a radio station in England where they can only broadcast to people in England. This tells the site that I am in England!!

Not really sure this applies to me as all the posts say that they have MSIE 7, I have 6

As for updates - I don’t have the latest MS updates (not since October)

Why do you think so?
To see if avast! is scanning emails, check one of these points:

  1. Is the avast icon (the special one of email scanning) be shown in the system tray?

  2. Is your email header with the lines X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS XXXXXX-X, XX/XX/2007), Inbound message and X-Antivirus-Status: Clean? (Right click the message, choose Properties and Details)

  3. Are clean notes added at the bottom of the email? (Internet Mail provider settings)

[b]You can test the security of your email system here: http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/[/b]

Make sure the avast plugin is not disabled into MS Outlook:

Outlook 2007 > Tools > Trust center > Add-inns > Manage Disabled items.
Outlook 2003 > Help > About > Disabled items.
Outlook 2000 > Tools menu > Options > Other > Advanced Options > Add-In Manager.

As reported a lot of times, the message “The provider is waiting on the subsystem to start” will be shown there until you open MS Outlook.
The plugin will be enabled automatically after that.

If so, send the files called unpXXXX to vlk (at) avast.com
They may contain more information about the problem (maybe a link to this thread).

I suppose avgas and not the antivirus.
Did you have any other antivirus in this computer in the past?

Tech,
Thanks a lot. I followed your instructions to see if any elements had been disabled in MS Office Outlook 2003. In fact AVAST was disabled!!! All 8 providers are now running!!! Now I must find out why and how AVAST was disabled in MS Office Outlook 2003.

Do you have any suggestions or thoughts about this? A virus?

Once again Thanks

I don’t think so… maybe some problem impossible to discover… Computer is not a deterministic object…

Hi just to say that I have done some scans with AVG antispy, and the panda online scanner and Kaspersky online scanner but nothing unusual…
Anyway thanks for your help!!

Unfortunatelly, there is a well-known problem of Panda not encrypting its signatures :stuck_out_tongue:

Every virus can be identified, because it contains some unique signatures. Antiviral programs have their own database of that signatures. We call this database the "virus definition file". When an antiviral program scans a file for viruses, it compares all the signatures (of all viruses) in the database with the signatures in that file. If the signatures match (they are the same), the file is marked as infected. For an antivirus program, it is important to hide this database of signatures somehow - e.g. by encrypting it. Panda Antivirus does not encrypt its virus database - the signatures inside are clearly "visible" to other antiviral programs, so they detect this file as infected (but there is actually no virus inside - only the signatures are the same).

These are false detections due to Panda active scan: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=12432.msg104932#msg104932
Read: http://www.avast.com/eng/virus_detection_and.html#idt_1554