One project I am working on is applying avast! to photo kiosks. Since almost all the photo kiosks I have seen were all infected (I’ll omit names here), but I sure the hell wouldn’t plug in my SD card without write protection. Here’s what we learned:
We installed avast! 6 Pro on the kiosk. We then disabled all the unnecessary shields (we’ll never use mail, etc) and when the kiosk loaded the photo application “Pixology”, the receipt printer driver was blocked from loading. After much research and testing in exclusions which is usually the ticket), we were unable to get the printer driver to load. We uninstalled and reinstalled avast!. We then tested with avast! default installation. Now the printer driver worked. We disabled some shields, tested again, and no reciept printer again.
Now we know the symptom is created by disabling shields. We again uninstalled avast!, and this time we performed a custom installation. We only installed the desired shields, and now everything is working perfectly.
I ASSUME, that disabling shields must trip the avast! “self protection” module, then avast! becomes more aggressive at stopping modifications to the operating system. I can provide more detail to anyone that is interested.
I wanted to post this, so when compatibility testing is occurring, that disabling shields may cause undesirable effects during testing. J.R.