Small Bug With Avast 4.8 Home and IE 8
Sometimes on Avast 4.8, when you right-click on the little ball in the System Tray will show the list of options slightly faded out before coming into view. On IE 7 this was often resolved once Avast had done what it needed to do. On IE 8, sometimes the right-menu comes in clear right away, but otherwise, in using IE 8, right-clicking on the Avast Ball has no effect.
So far the only way to get right-click back is to reboot, note that Avast 4.8 Home Search Engine has not been updated since February 5th, 2009 and that IE 8 was first released out of Beta around March 15.
Time for Avast to issue a patch for this bug. Will watch for any changes.
Jack
PS Computer Specs. Dell Dimension PC, Windows XP (SP-3) All critical hardware and software updates installed 512 RAM
I think I found the problem and fixed the issues with IE 8 and IE 7 with the screen fade-out when right-clicking on the Avast icon ball. Site Advisor is very tightly integrated with Yahoo and for those of you that have the plug in, note that there is a search box in addition to an option where you can block the red x ratings from Search results if you check the Safe Search box as part of the SA plug in for IE or Firefox.
The conflict that I had, seemed to be some web-shield in either Yahoo’s search as a part of Site Advisor or the search box in Site Advisor that conflicts with Avast’s web shield. What I did was, I still use Site Advisor, BUT I disabled the Safe Search box AND also the block red site ratings from Search results, and the screen fades are gone! Yahoo was also driving me crazy with the banner ad annimation slowing down my computer on their homepage so I changed my home page to Google, disabled the Yahoo Safe Search box in Site Advisor and I can not belive the improve difference in speed and functionality in Avast!
While I think that Site Advisor is a fine product, if you are noticing the screen fades when right-clicking with Avast’s ball in your System Tray, click on the Arrow in Site Advisor and:
Uncheck the Enable Safe Search box in General Settings. This may help other users with the problem that I had. I also switched my homepage to Google. Note that you really only need to do this if you are having the issues that I described above with Yahoo in conjunction with Site Advisor’s Safe Serf box and Avast. I also made Google my default search engine.
Adding a bit more RAM will help quite a bit as RAM is the cheapest and easiest way to improve system performance and an additional 256MB RAM can be had for little cost.
Update: Still get the slight fade-out on right-clicking, but much less than before. I thank you for the added RAM suggestion and will keep this in mind for the future!