Before I write about my problems – why is Avast Support so bad about replying, or so good about not replying.
I have run free Avast for several years on 3 of my own systems as well as few friends’ systems. I purchased AIS for 3 systems at the special price a little over a week ago. My 3 systems are 1) a laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, 2) a tower running Windows Media Center Edition (XP Pro), 3) a laptop running Windows XP Home Edition.
Avast technical people from India installed it remotely on the first of my systems last Friday (I believe) and I immediately detected that my most important application (a DOS application, MYM) was no longer running correctly – acting like some of its data files were not there. The Avast guys tried various things like tweaking my User settings, fireway, Avast settings, to no avail. Then they reverted to free Avast and all was well with the DOS application. I reported this to Element 5 (the payment system), Avast support (via an online incident form and by direct email), and Avast sales. I have yet to hear from Avast support. Avast sales sounds willing to refund my money if I want.
Today I successfully installed AIS on the XP laptop.
Then I installed it on the Windows MCE tower computer. During the install I saw a quick error message which disappeared and the installation completed. I rebooted and insterted the license and it appears normal in many respects but I have no network connects to the Internet, the other computers, or my printer. I have looked at everything in Avast, Network device settings, etc. but no go. I replied about this to one of Avast sales’ emails but have heard nothing since.
P.S. I looked at the *.log files at \documents and settings\allusers\application data.… The only one legible are mail.log and firewall.log which have messages around the time of the install on the MCE machine this morning. Firewall.log has just 2 messages: GetAdaptersInfo error 0. The other has many types of messages.
I spent many hours today installing, reinstalling, uninstalling, rebooting, researching issues, and finalling falling back to Free Avast on my 3rd system. During the process I had my network not working, AIS not working, blue screen crashes, misleading messages about “Found new hardware”, you name it. I followed instructions to the letter:
boot up in SAFE mode
run aswClear5
reboot, run setup.ais.exe
reboot, insert license
As previously mentioned, caused me problems on my 1st install (actually done by Avast employees remotely from India) on my Windows 7 laptop and had to fall back. AIS is running OK on my other laptop (XP).
Yokenny, no one but you has replied to this thread. Meanwhile I see “tons” of reports about people’s systems screwed up by installations of 5.1.899 whether Free, AIS, or Pro, and esp. about screwed up Windows 7 systems.
i.e comodo/outpost/previxx or something like that ? <<
I have no idea what those are and I certainly don’t run them. (Sound very Brit to me.
All 3 systems are similar but not identical in terms of apps and utilities but nothing too exotic, I don’t think. All have Avast (AIS or Free), Ad-Aware, Malwarebytes, MS Office 2007, Firefox 3.6.x and 4.?? Beta, Adobe Reader 9, Irfanview, current Skype, etc. but none of those ever caused a problem while running free Avast.
It is just intriguing that this only affects some 7 systems - so there is a conflict of some sort somewhere, I always look to security programmes first as the source. From there I would look at optimisation type programmes and backup systems. But, in reality it could be anything running at start
