Ok, I finally updated to 4.8.1201. : It went fine yesterday – even a complete scan of my ‘C’ drive went better than expected. Since I use ZoneAlarm (ver. 7.0.302.000) I half way expected avast to hang on the log file in ‘system restore’ area like I’ve read about. It didn’t. The scan went just fine.
This morning when I booted up, I noticed that the avast icon wasn’t spinning or was no longer animated. Tested avast with eicar and it worked… just no animation. Found thru a search of this forum that some had success with ‘repairing avast’ through the control panel. Didn’t correct the problem right away even though repair said, “Successful” – but after a reboot, it’s working again. Not sure if the reboot or ‘repair’ actually corrected this.
But, I haven’t seen avast do a ‘Anti-rootkit’ scan yet. I was looking for it to happen yesterday after updating about 8 minutes after reboot. Even had my event viewer up and watched for it the first time. I do in fact have it set to do a rootkit scan (nothing ticked under troubleshooting screen).
Is the rootkit scan completely transparent? Should avast spin when this is being done? How can I tell when/if anti-rootkit scan is happening?
BTW, a couple of weeks ago I ran avast’s beta ‘Anti-Rootkit’ (aswar) just to see if I would have any trouble with 4.8 when I did finally update. The aswar ran fine and took about 25 minutes I think.
First ensure that the option is enabled to animate the icon, Program Settings, Appearance, Animate the icon when scanning. If that isn’t enabled the repair wouldn’t have any inpact so it is entirely possibly it would return success.
You won’t see an anti-rootkit scan it is an integral part of avast, it runs in the background 8 minutes after boot and as a part of the Standard and Thorough on-demand scans. You won’t see any icon activity whilst a rootkit scan is going on.
The scan should take seconds rather than minutes, check the C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\DATA\log\aswAr.log there is a summary at the end of the file.
It went fine yesterday – even a complete scan of my ‘C’ drive went better than expected. Since I use ZoneAlarm (ver. 7.0.302.000) I half way expected avast to hang on the log file in ‘system restore’ area like I’ve read about. It didn’t. The scan went just fine.