spontaneous crashes & reboot caused by Avast Free 2262 in Windows XP

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi all,

since April or possibly late March 2016 I’ve been plagued by unexpected crashes to a black screen followed by a rapid reboot. These were characterised initially as any attempt to open or create a Word document or use USB comms to my old Palm Tungsten E2. Excel didn’t seem to by affected. I have to confess my MS Office Pro is the old, but perfectly serviceable '97 version. Later the behaviour worsened when the PC would crash within minutes of the desktop showing on first boot, usually appearing stable after the 2nd boot. Word would always crash it still. Eventually I saw it reboot 4 times ! At this time I could log into another account and then move into my usual one, but the Word issue persisted in any account.

I blamed various recent installs, one a Bluetooth dongle, so tried an XP System restore back to early March. This had no effect other than loosing some recent work.

At this point I decided to bite the bullet and do a partition restore using a Macrium Reflect image from 2013. Not very trivial, but with mostly the same software installed. All seemed well after updating to the latest Avast as a first priority, with nice clean boots. However the Word issue remained! HOW could that be ? Eventually a crash on first boot occurred too.

I now tried to use Windows minidump crash reports to identify the problem, initially with dumpchk.exe in Windows Support Tools. This was far too technical and thankfully I found Bluescreen view at nirsoft.net which analysed these files. Immediately an Avast driver was identified, aswSnx.sys as the likely cause of the crash.

I removed the ethernet cable and turned off Avast. The crash issue was resolved, with no further problems. I could make it re-occur by starting Avast again. Eventually I discovered that unticking “scan programs when executing” in Active protection/Scan when executing, achieved the same result, without dire warnings in the notification area.

I do however now feel, let down and less protected with this setup.

Does anyone have a better solution ?

thanks for reading

System Spec:
HP Compaq DC7600, Pentium 4 HT 3.4GHz, 3GB RAM, 750GB HD, Win XP SP3

2

Follow instructions: https://www.avast.com/faq.php?article=AVKB33#artTitle

3

Thanks for answer.
Unfortunately support is not available through the support portal for Avast Free, only paid versions.

4

Support is free and is for all avast versions.

5

Use this link: https://support.avast.com/support/tickets/new?form=3

6

Asyn,

thanks for your support on this. The last link you provided got me through to support, who were fantastic, with very quick response.

It turns out my problem is caused by a bug in Ver. 2016.11.1.2262 , hopefully to be resolved in the next release. Meanwhile my work around, previously mentioned, is working OK for the moment.

Hope this might help others.

7

You’re welcome.