shields turning off by themselves on startup

I shutdown my computer every night. Every day lately, when the computer starts up, the Avast tray icon has an exclamation point on it and when I open it it says “Some shields are turned off” and gives me a button to click to turn them back on. It doesn’t say what shields or why they are turned off. I’m not turning anything off so why are they turning themselves off automatically? It’s rather annoying to have to turn them back on every day not to mention unsafe, especially if I forget and start doing things on the internet before I remember or notice the icon. I have the free version of Avast on Windows 7.

Repair Avast:

  1. Control Panel → Add/Remove programs → Avast
  2. Click on ‘Repair’.
  3. Follow instructions.
  4. Reboot.

Whilst an avast repair may well resolve the problem.

I would suggest before doing this you restart your system, if you see the Avast tray icon with an exclamation point, try opening the UI to identify what Shield, Component, that hasn’t started. Right click on the tray icon and select About Avast > Components and see if you can find the one not running.

There have been occasions when a shield or component is slow to start.

You may also check the avastUI > Settings > General > Status Monitoring and check if a component that you aren’t running has status monitoring enabled.

I followed your instructions, it’s the Behavior Shield that’s turned off. I checked under Status Monitoring and it’s not checked there. Program Version and Definitions auto updates are also unchecked but everything else is checked. The shield is not slow to start, there have been times I’ve forgotten about the shield being off for hours and it’s still off when i get to it. I’ll try the repair mentioned above and come back here if it doesn’t work.

OK, report back.

Just restarted and not getting the exclamation point this time so it looks like it worked. It says everything is ok right now. Hopefully that fixed it.

Just letting you know I have the same problem with the Behaviour shield, but in my case it’s not every time I reboot it’s turned of, only now and then;
https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=201143.msg1388146#msg1388146

Interesting to know I’m not alone. I have also been recommended to try repair, but have not tried this yet, lazy as I am…

I’ve noticed the Behavior Shield was disabled on startup “a handful” of times on my Win7x64 system…
by going into Services and starting the aswbIDSAgent service, I was then able to enable the Behavior Shield from within avast’s settings / components menu.

All I’ve had to do is left right click on the Avast icon in the system tray and select Avast Shield Control | Enable all shields.

I take it you mean ‘right’ click on the Avast icon in the system tray and select Avast Shield Control | Enable all shields. As ‘left’ clicking on it opens the UI.

Yes, got in a hurry with a distraction in the room. :-[

yes i was able to do that as well, but the problem for me was that i shouldn’t have to remember to turn them back on, or notice the warning. they shouldn’t have been turning off to begin with. there were several times I forgot and didn’t notice the warning until i had been using the internet for hours and that was unsafe. however, so far, they have stayed on since doing the repair.

Happening to my system also. But its the firewall that is disabling.
i think I did the repair once, but I will try it again. Also my firewall has “DCom service” on lowest setting. Shouldn’t that be on full allow? or should i start another thread for that?

Sounds good, thanks for the feedback.

Hmm guess im not alone in having the behavior shield off when I started my computer today.

Damnit, i take it back. When i started my computer today, the Behavior Shield was off again… so…back to square one?

It does it now and then on my Dell 8200 XP PRO SP3 box … same thing “behavior shield not enabled” … This is with Avast Free 2291 … it has not happened on my Toshiba Laptop with Windows 10 Home 64 Bit (hopefully they fix it in the next major release)

You could try the latest beta: https://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=15

Avast is now at 17.4.2294 Final … just came out today … hopefully this issue has been fixed.

Problem still happening on my Dell 8200 with Windows XP PRO SP3 … when I first boot up, all are enabled and about 5 minutes later, I find the Behavior Shield has disabled itself. It can be reenabled and seems to stay (can’t say for how long as I typically will use this computer for about 2 hours) … This has not happened on the Toshiba Laptop with Windows 10 Home 64 Bit OS … This is Avast Free 17.4.2294 (build 17.4.3482.0) … and yes, I tried a Repair of Avast yesterday. Needless to say, this is annoying.