You should exclude a dedicated folder intended for downloads. (Such as, say, D:\Downloads or whatever). Not system %TEMP% - this one should remain virtualized. And save your downloads there. If it still doesn’t work, the sandbox has a bug. Not familiar w/ the sandbox in Avast, but sandboxie has a feature called quick recovery. It initially virtualizes the above D:\Downloads or whatever you configure, when the download is completed, it will prompt you whether you want the file recovered from sandbox to the live filesystem location.

Wrt PDFs - yeah these need to be treated within sandbox code if you use a browser plugin to display them. If you set up the PDF reader so that it opens its own window and does not display the PDF in browser, the problem should be gone. Again, the above valid and tested with sandboxie, not with avast. :wink: