Sick and tired of false positives, about ready to uninstall avast!

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I get many many false positives all the time. A large variety of content. From a simple non-infected no cd crack I use to play games I own, not wanting to load the CD every single time I want to play, to games that I’ve bought at stores.

I am sick of this.
I bought a game in 2000, made by Microsoft, yes that Microsoft. Avast tells me that is a virus too.
The problem is, when selecting “Run normally” it completely kills the exe file on a permanent level.
If ANY program, no matter how legit is found as a false positive, it renders the entire program useless.
Yes, I’ve added it to “Exclusions” under settings. After doing so, the exe always crashes.

I hope you can see my frustration. Games that I own, I cannot put a simple legal cd crack on in order to avoid using the cd each and every time.

Games that I don’t even use a crack for, made by MICROSOFT flag.

I’ve just had a program be killed by avast and even after adding an exclusion, it is useless and my money spent on the game is now gone.

I want one question answered, not a link on how to report false positives.

How do I add a file to exceptions, and the file open again instead of crashing on start up.
I want my programs to stop becoming useless.
Anyone??

2

I hope you find answers for your problem. :wink: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=90081.30

PS:You can send false positive files to Avast. How?

-via Email (virus@avast.com)
-via Avast Chest

Bye

3

Set behaviour shield and autosandbox to ask

4

I think they say avast is the antivirus that has less false positives… if you switch to any of the other antiviruses you might see a lot more of them… (Just sayin)

5

Hi markmcx,

This has nothing to do with false positives. Do as essexboy suggests. This new feature of avast is just checking everything it encounters for the first time and is not known, and does that with full caution. I had some oldie goldie programs and it also allowed me to open them up through this procedure at the first encounter. Sometimes it can help users to again critically look at a download that is questionable after all, sometimes it is just good, signed and secure, then change the settings for the second time. Good you came here to ask, now you know what it is and what it does,and you might feel happy with that extra layer of protection,

polonus

6

I read all of the posts on the link that was first provided, and I do not see how it applies.
As for having the sandbox to ask, it already does.

When a program flags as suspicious, I do select “Run normally”
This SEEMS as if it fixes it, as when trying to run the file again, it does not show as a virus.
But, it is still too late, after the very first detection, any file found suspicious, regardless of exception, regardless of applying “Run normally” the exe is now killed and rendered useless. After being detected the first time, all I see when running the program is “ Has stopped responding.”

Avast kills my exes and renders them useless. Even after excluding. Sure, no more virus alerts, but still Avast kills the exe.
Even having uninstalled Avast! now, my exe now no longer works, where as a year ago, before having avast, it did work.

I need to know how to undo the damage Avast! has caused to the exe.

It acts as if Avast corrupts the file.
As even uninstalled it still crashes.

The problem is… it also acts as if any file with the same name is rendered inoperable. I can download a backup of the file, same name, it still crashes.

ALL of these work without avast! being installed, the moment avast is there to detect it, the exe no longer works.
I’ve tested this, having reformatted my pc. I installed these, and they worked fine. I then installed avast, and the exe is detected, then killed. Backups, duplicates, or anything of the same name now fail.

I know its not a compatability error, as in it’s not something i have to disable avast for to run, because this -ONLY- ever happens when a file is detected. Avast is killing the exe code or something along those lines.

7

No, avast! doesn’t modify the executable in any way, there’s no such code there (also shown by the fact that restoring the file from backup doesn’t change anything).
Are we talking about the same program each time? If so, my guess would be that it stores some info on the first run somewhere (in its registry, INI file, …) - and when the first run fails because of the autosandbox, that info is persisted and causes the subsequent crashes.
If it’s not the same program, then it would have to be some strange conflict with some other low-level software… because avast! does not do any persistent changes to the files (well, unless you instruct it to remove them after a detection, of course) or to the system - so if the problem remains even after you uninstall avast!, the real cause of the crashes must be something else.

You can put the file into the AutoSandbox list of exclusions even before the first run:
Real-time Shields / FileSystem Shield / Expert Settings / AutoSandbox / Add