Hi, I’m a new user to to avast! Home Edition 4.8 (I have XP Home SP3).
What I’m going to describe seems like a straightforward issue to me but I couldn’t find anything about it in the guides or forum (maybe I’m not good at searching …)
Say I’ve got a folder full of, for example, Excel files:
When I simply open that folder, I don’t want avast! to scan the unopened Excel files.
However, when I open an Excel file in that folder, I want avast! to scan the Excel file being opened.
I can’t seem to make this combination happen, though.
I’ve got “Show detailed info on performed action” turned on.
I open the folder, avast! scans every unopened .xls file. This isn’t necessary and just slows my system down.
If I exclude the folder, though, then avast! won’t scan an Excel file in the folder when I open it. This is exactly what I want the on-access scanner to do, though.
Am I missing something? This isn’t an Excel-specific question, I just used Excel as an example.
In general, I want avast! to ignore unopened files (xls, pdf, doc, jpg, etc, etc, etc) but scan them when opened. Does this not make sense?
According to the detailed information avast! is showing, though, I can’t seem to find a way to make this happen. I’ve tried all sorts of Scanner-tab (Basic and Advanced) and Advanced-tab settings.
Avast! checking unopened files is noticeably slowing down folder navigation (vs. if I exclude a folder – but again, though, then there’s no protection when I open a file in the folder).
It sounds like you’ll need to turn off scanning for the Excel folder and I’m not exactly sure how to do that short of pausing the scanner. There might be a setting in one of the Resident Protection modules where you can define an exception. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable on this than myself will have an answer.
If you can get that turned off you can scan individual files with the Explorer Extension. Just go to the file you want to scan, right click, and in the menu you’ll see “Scan (filename).” Depending on how it’s configured you may also see a blue avast! icon. The settings for this are in the Program
Settings>Common.
One crucial thing you don’t mention, your standard shield sensitivity and other settings are, I have mine on the Normal (default) setting and this doesn’t happen with XP Pro SP3.
- However, when I open an Excel file in that folder, I want avast! to scan the Excel file being opened.
It would be a security issue to exclude the folder from on-access scanning and isn’t selective to exclude all files but scan opened ones…
So what are your standard shield settings and have you made any tweaks ?
What other security software do you have ?
As if any access these files that would force avast to scan them.
DavidR, thank you for your reply. To your questions:
My Standard Shield sensitivity is “Normal”
– All settings under the Scanner (Basic), Scanner (Advance), Blocker, and Advanced tabs are the default ones,
except under the Advanced tab I have checked “Show detail info on performed action.”
– I didn’t make any changes to Avast under the program settings.
I don’t have any other security software. I have Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware on my machine but strictly on-demand
(the context menu scan isn’t even enabled).
By tweaks, do you mean to XP (e.g., using Tweak UI)? If so, yes, I have a couple – could tweaks to XP make a difference?
So, when I open a folder (any folder), why does Avast scan idle files?
I wouldn’t ask except that’s what Avast spends most of its time doing on my machine.
This is noticeably slowing things down on my computer.
The “Show detail info on performed action” Avast scan-stacks are tall with idle files just sitting in folders.
Why isn’t Avast just scanning process-related files? E.g., Files opened, programs executed, process-stack .dll files, etc.?
That’s what I expected Avast would be spending most of its time on, not scanning files in opened folders.
Excluding folders isn’t an option because I want active files in folders to be scanned.
By tweaks I meant to avast, that is why I posted that image as that is the one which is most relevant.
With the settings in my image and Normal sensitivity my set-up doesn’t scan .xls files in the folder I keep xls files when I open it.
I have my folder view set to Details not thumbnails, list, icons, etc. so i don’t know how you have the folder view set (or if that would make any difference) ?
When an icon is displayed for the file type it usually has to extract that from somewhere but that if anything would be a one of event for .xls and not scan all .xls files.
Other than this I’m not really sure what is going on as a resident/on-access scanner should only scan files that are accessed and not just opening a folder.
If avast! scans the file, then it is (being) opened. Who opens it, that’s another question - but avast! doesn’t scan the content of opened foldes just by itself - someone must be “touching” the files.
Did you ever figured this out bubbaboo13? Oddly mine started doing something very similar. Out of the blue the Standard Shield started scanning one of my folders. I tried everything I could think of but nothing was working. I scanned but nothing was found. Every time I rebooted it started where it left off, the ball just spinning around and around. Then almost by accident I Terminated the shield completely and turned it back on and aparently that fixed it. It must have been stuck or something. I had already Paused it several times but that did nothing, Terminating seems to have done the trick.
I don’t know if this is exactly what you were experiencing but it seemed similar so I thought I would mention it.
- When I simply open that folder, I don't want avast! to scan the unopened Excel files.
- However, when I open an Excel file in that folder, I want avast! to scan the Excel file being opened.
-= The file is already scanned while it wasn’t opened & does not scan it anymore upon opening it since it was already scanned while it was “idle”… Right…? ???
Well... Standard Shield is scanning files and programs being accessed in background... It's normal, it is how it works.
I know its normal at startup to scan programs that are loaded into memory and then continue to scan periodically as files are accessed, but it shouldn’t scan every file in a folder that’s not even open should it?
Trick ??? What is the trick? You're disabling your antivirus protection, that's not a trick ???
Just a figure of speech. I scanned manually with both Defender and avast! and no threats were detected so I hardly see how terminating the shield and quickly restarting it is a threat. To be honest, I was considering terminating it permanently. That Standard Shield doesn’t seem all that critical, at least not as critical as some of the others.
All I know is that it was scanning nonstop, now it’s not.
Yes I agree, terminating would be a risky proposition, one I wouldn’t consider without backup antivirus protection. I was considering it only as a last resort. ;D
The damn thing started in again tonight about the same time it did last night so I did some digging, found Google Desktop, disabled it and the ball finally stopped. I don’t know what happened before. I must have coincidentally turned it off and back on at the exact time Google Desktop quit.
Thanks for that tip Tech. Will Microsoft never stop dreaming up new ways to consume resources???
I’m still having the problem with Avast scanning unopened documents (e.g., unopened Excel spreadsheets) when I navigate into a folder.
I disabled the indexing service on my computer long ago, so that’s not the source of the problem.
I’ve run Process Monitor to see what’s happening. Below is an example of what Avast is doing to each unopened file. This set of operations takes approximately 0.008 seconds – multiply that by the number of files in a folder. Why is Avast doing these operations? Again, I’m just going into a folder, not opening any documents. Avast doing the below to each file is noticeably slowing things down and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for these operations.
No, Avast’s on-access scanner still scans the files.
Just to make sure I correctly did what you asked: This is after I unchecked the boxes “Scan files on open” and “Scan created/modified files” under the Scanner (Advanced) tab of the Resident task settings.