In the last two days, I made a total system reset with new system revery install on a Guillemot Hercules eCAFÉ EC-900CW with WinXP home. I totally updated almost all windows updates that microsoft did put in the list. Among them was also a file “avifil32.dll” that Avast found generic adware. Today - after a virus-database-update, the suspicion is gone and the file is treated as non-infected file. So far so good. But what really was a problem: I could not find out what version the file was, as avast was suppressing the entire “Version”-subpage of the file properties - even when telling avast not to do anything with the file. And when the file is an application, it is treated as a DOS-application and shows details, how the “DOS”-command-prompt-window should treat the display etc. what is rubbish for that kind of exe-file.
When stopping avast-protection, the file properties dialogue comes as it should.
I consider it as an issue that file version properties are not displayed correctly as this makes it impossible to find out important details of the affected file like from where the file comes, what version it has, what company the file created etc. without disabling avast protection; and this is not the aim of a protection!
I understand your concern, but… If avast! considers the file as infected, it doesn’t allow access to it (so that you couldn’t start it, for example). Displaying the file properties is just another access to the file…
I know what you mean - but anyway the situation is not acceptable - in two ways: it is not only provoking false results (exe treated as DOS-application), but also not allowing access even when the user MANUALLY! want’s to override the avast restriction.
The result is that the user stops avast protection just to read the file info - and maybe then other bad things provoked by other software that avast is intended to block are possible as protection is turned off.
Avast has to find a way to read the file information (some kind of a sandbox) without the need of turning off complete protection shield. Specially with affected files it can be important to be able to look at the version properties.
Another thing is that if avast reports a suspicion and the user says “no action”, avast even then makes restrictions to the use of that file - even not allowing to see the version properties. This also is to consider as an issue as avast does not do “no action”.
Or is there an advanced mode that adds some more buttons in case of an alert?