After electing to put background processes “To sleep” with Avast Cleanup to improve performance, (Adobe Reader and Adobe Photoshop Elements 12) the programs could not be opened until I uninstalled the Avast Cleanup program. My understanding was that the programs would start on demand when needed. I also could not get the cleanup program itself to open, this is why I uninstalled. Maybe I’ll try again someday when the bugs are worked out.
Hi,
this is definitely not the intended behavior as it should start the sleeping programs on demand as you described.
We would like to investigate what happened on your computer and why it does not work how it should but for that we would need the log files.
If you would be so kind and try to install it again and collect the logs we would really appreciate your help!
Log files are stored here: c:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Tuneup\log\ and you could then upload it either to your favourite file share or you could use our FTP server ftp.avast.com/ftp/incoming/ (login: anonymous).
Thank you!
I put Facebook Game room to sleep and it won’t wake up either. I’ve followed the instructions to use the Rescue option and Avast now thinks its running but it won’t open. I’ve rebooted my windows 10 box a few times and just now uninstalled Game room and reinstalled. It was hard to reinstall but I finally got it back. But it still won’t open. WTH!
Well I don’t know what did it but I was finally able to get Facebook Gameroom going again. Other than the steps I outlined in my earlier post I did nothing further. Looks like it take 24 hours or more to fix itself once you have woken it via the Rescue page.
Not good Avast definitively not a selling point. >:(
Hi,
this is very unfortunate situation and we are sorry for that.
Could you please help us to investigate the issue by collecting the Cleanup log files?
Log files are stored here: c:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Tuneup\log\ and you could then upload it either to your favourite file share or you could use our FTP server ftp.avast.com/ftp/incoming/ (login: anonymous).
Thank you!
This same thing just happened to me, too! Both of my Paintshop Pro versions will not open, even though they show to be running in Task Manager. My Sony DVD creator lost its registration and has to be re-register. What a mess!!! The cleanup speeded up the computer, for sure, but at WHAT A TERRIBLE COST!
I agree with everyone that this is a horrible program! I do not recommend it. What a nightmare and I’m not sure it’s even fixable. Plus, the verification code is SO blasted hard to read, it takes a dozen attempts to post a comment here.
This is going to cost a fortune to fix the damage caused by Avast Cleanup, if it even can be fixed. I’m furious. I have a mountain of work to do and none of my crucial programs will open. I just called my computer repair person and she’s going to have to try to fix it without destroying what Avast didn’t already destroy.
QUICK SOLUTION: Within Avast Cleanup, click on “Speed up” icon. Open “Background & startup programs”. Scroll to the bottom of the list, find the green font that says “# programs sleeping” and click on it. Find your program on the list and click “wake”. If it’s not on the list, see an Alternate temporary work-around in the next paragraph:
ALTERNATE SOLUTION: Solution to get programs running but keep it otherwise under “sleep” mode in Avast (I had to do this with my university’s VPN service which Avast constantly shutdown…after 8 hours of troubleshooting I figured it out) *****(NOTE: This is just a temporary fix-action, but won’t change the Avast Cleanup setting of putting the program to sleep afterwards. You will have to repeat this temporary fix-action on every login/user session when you want to use the program. In my case, if I did not do the settings change within Cleanup itself (see QUICK SOLUTION) then it would shutdown my VPN after 2 minutes of it running):
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Run Task Manager as ADMINISTRATOR.
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Once Task Manager opens, go to “Startup” tab and locate your program. Check the status, it should say “Disabled”. Right click and hit “Enable”. You can close this window.
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Now, open Services as ADMINISTRATOR
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Locate your program in the list and in the “Startup Type” column you should see “Disabled” and the column left to that (Status) should be blank.
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Right click, hit “Properties”. In the first tab that you’ll be sent to (“General”) you’ll see in the middle of the window “Startup type:” and a drop-down menu. It should be showing “Disabled”. Click on the drop-down menu and select “Automatic”. Hit "Apply " button in the bottom right corner, then “Ok” to close the window.
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RIGHT CLICK on the program in the Services list once more! And select “Start” (If you don’t do this, it still won’t run. Because up to this point you have only changed the Startup settings, but have not enabled it to run in this open user session). Once you hit Start a window will pop up and then close, and voila. You’re running.
You should now be able to run your program. If you have issues while running the program again, run Services as an Administrator and when you right click once more on the program you’ll see action buttons “Start…Stop…Pause…Resume…” If they are not grey’d out, then use these. If the are grey’d out, then go into Properties and repeat step 5.
THE PROBLEM THAT REMAINS is you will need to do this EVERY TIME. Also, in my case, Avast Cleanup still persists in shutting off my VPN and putting it to “sleep” after its been on for more than 2 minutes. So without being able to “wake” it in the Cleanup program itself, your only option might be to have to uninstall Cleanup altogether and just get rid of it.
Hi,
did I get it correctly that you put to sleep your VPN client using Cleanup and now you are not able to revert it back by clicking on “Wake” because you could not find the VPN in the “Background & startup programs” list?
Or how did you get into the situation you described above?
I am just asking because Cleanup really shall not mess with programs on its own until user specifically selects some of them and put them to sleep. Although according to what you described it seems that there is a problem with waking up the VPN client and I would like to know more about it so we can fix that issue.
Also if you could provide us with logs from you machine so we can look at them to be able to analyze the issue we would really appreciate that!
Application logs files are stored here: c:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Tuneup\log, we would need ALL files from this folder.
Setup logs files are stored here: c:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Temp, in this folder look for a file named like this Setup Log 2018-01-30 #001.txt.
Then you can pack everything into a zip archive and either upload them to a favourite file server of yours or you can use our public FTP server for the purpose:ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming/ (login: anonymous).
Thank you for your cooperation.
There is not a cut and dry way to awake sleeping programs. I do not find the speed up icon or any way to wake up PDF
The same thing happened to me. I used the instructions above on March 17th to wake up programs and removed them all and my Microsoft Outlook starting working again. This is a silly feature and does not work as intended and caused me quite a bit of research until I found this thread. Thank God it can be reversed. I won’t be using it again and will probably remove Avast Cleanup Premium
Hi,
we apologize for your troubles it is definitely not the intended behavior of our product.
We still don’t know why it happens so we would really appreciate the logs from your PC.
You can simply send them by executing our log collector utility from this path C:\Program Files (x86)\AVAST Software\Avast Cleanup\tulogcollector.exe assuming that you have still Avast Cleanup installed on your computer.
Just please add your email address there so we can join the logs with your report here.
Thank you.
I just elected to let AVAST put all my background programs to sleep as it indicated they would wake up any time I want to use them. This is NOT happening, and now I can’t use any of the programs I use on a daily basis! And I work from home. What I do to get access to all my documents now? Get iCloud to transfer photos as it has been doing for 3 years? I am kicking myself that I believed that this would be OK to do!!
Have had the same problems. I have fought with word not opening for days, have tried everything including trying to find out if it was a problem with Avast tune up. But Avast when trying to find out the sleeping programs just went round and round forever with nothing happening. Today I decided to uninstall Avast tune up and guess what everything has started again including Word. Has this been a waste of money
Hi,
if some of the apps are not waken up automatically, please specify which programs/apps in which version you have a problem with so we can test them in our environment. The automatic wake functionality is build in a general way to work for every program but it might happen that some program needs a special handling and we would like to know that so we can adjust the functionality accordingly.
Additionally I would like to ask you to provide us with logs we could then analyze to see what happened in your case and fix it for the next version if possible.
You can simply send them by executing our log collector utility from this path C:\Program Files (x86)\AVAST Software\Avast Cleanup\tulogcollector.exe assuming that you have still Avast Cleanup installed on your computer.
Just please add your email address there so we can join the logs with your report here.
Thank you.
Hi there,
Yesterday I installed the Avast Cleanup Premium to give it a try. After Fixing & Cleaning broken registry and shortcuts I put asleep some programs including Adobe Acrobat DC. I found out the files do not wake up so I set it up to wake mode. However, it didnt help and pdf files open only for a few seconds when they shut down after. Also jpg files now appear with indefinite icon, but I can open them with windows photo viewer.
I uninstalled the avast clean up hoping it would help but it did not.
I use Adobe Acrobat DC for work and I am stuck now.
Are you now kidding me with the verification requirements to post?
Captcha is only needed for your first 3 posts. (Spam protection)
Hi,
We apologize for the inconvenient situation.
In order to be able to help you I would like to ask you to send the log files so we can investigate where the problem is.
You can simply send them by executing our log collector utility from this path C:\Program Files (x86)\AVAST Software\Avast Cleanup\tulogcollector.exe assuming that you have still Avast Cleanup installed on your computer.
Just please add your email address there so we can join the logs with your report here.
Thank you.
This old thread saved me. Thank you very much for the suggestion about uninstalling Avast Cleanup!
Soon after I started using Avast Cleanup Premium and ‘optimized’ everything including putting all programs to sleep, my Firefox browser stopped working properly. I could no longer open links in new tabs (every new tab remained blank and the page loading indicator didn’t move at all). Then, when I tried exiting Firefox, all the Firefox processes in the task manager remained active for a whole minute (normally when I exit the browser, the processes disappear almost immediately).
The weird thing is, Firefox wasn’t even in the list of programs that were put to sleep by Avast. I ‘woke up’ all the programs there but that didn’t fix it. Only after I removed Avast Cleanup, my browser was back to normal.
I didn’t even get a chance to use other programs before this happened, so I don’t know if anything else was affected the same way.
Anyway, I’m glad I found this thread. Considering that people were having similar issues with Avast Cleanup from 2017, and it’s still breaking things in 2022, I doubt that I will ever try it again.