Question about excluding locations from resident scanning

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I’m getting a lot of scanning error messages in the log viewer. To avoid these, I am trying to exclude certain locations from resident scanning. Going to standard shield / customize / advanced, I use the “list of locations that will not be scanned” to add locations. Some of the addresses of the locations are long such as C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 etc.

Is there some way to exclude a whole group of locations with one command such as exclude :\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files*.*

or do I have to type out the complete location down to the exact file name each time.

2

These efforts may be an unnecessary waste of effort for you.

It would help if you tell us some more information about the error messages you are seeing.

3

Look at the examples already in there, it accepts ? and * wildcard.

?:\Files\Not\To\Be*\Checked*.ex?

Would exempt all of these :

C:\Files\Not\To\Be\WILLNOT\Checked*.exe

C:\Files\Not\To\Be\ShouldNot\Checked*.ext

D:\Files\Not\To\Be\AlsoNot\Checked*.exz

E:\Files\Not\To\Be\Omitted\Checked*.exp

4

But … why bother to go to all the effort suggested by Styx if these reports are not causing you any problems?

Not every file can be scanned by avast (for very good reasons) … if it is these you are trying to exclude your effort is a total waste of time.

So please take heed to my earlier question.

5

The error messsage is the same, many times a day: It says “AAVM scanning error: x_AavmCheckFileDirectEx: avfilesScanReal of…”

With the next part being the specific location where the scanning error occurred. The location is either a part of the SQL database on my server or a temporary internet file of one sort or another.

Perhaps not coincidentally, each day I have experienced one or more freeze-ups in two programs: 1) the project management program on my workstation tied to the SQL database on the server and 2) Internet Explorer.

Thus, I inferred that the slowdowns or freezeups may be tied to the scanning errors.

The scanning errors were much more common when I was using the shields at High setting, but now I have lowered it to “low” and have excluded the specific location on the server and also tried to exclude the temp internet files.

6

I seem to have made the reverse mistake I’m afraid, I was wondering what the default settings for the resident protection was, because Avast is now scanning every file. While extremely safe, I truly don’t need it to tell me every two seconds that it has scanned firefox, so is there a way to revert the resident to default?

7

The default setting is Normal for the Standard Shield, if you raise it to High it will scan all accessed files.

However what you describe isn’t only increasing the sensitivity but tweaking it to show what it is doing.

  • Standard Shield > Customize > Advanced - ‘Show detailed info on performed actions’ this option is off by default, so it would appear you have been tweaking avast without knowing the effect it will have. This function is also on the Web Shield and Internet Mail providers so you should also check those.
8

Set the Standard Shield to “Normal” level (and not High or Customized).