Another “Chinese” key was created yesterday. Again, with a reference to Avast (different):
潣癡獡灩汃敩瑮慐慲敭整獲䌮湯楦畧慲楴湯敖獲潩ne
Interpreting this as 8-bit ASCII characters rather than 32-bit UNICODE characters yields this (refers to Avast’s “.ConfigurationVersion” rather than “.IsConnectedToManagedConsole”):
ÿþcom.avast.ipm.ClientParameters.ConfigurationVersion e
I noticed this new “Chinese” key shortly after I ran Avast’s “Smart Scan” – but I don’t know if it was in the registry before that.
Additional information, if it would help:
When these “Chinese” keys first started appearing back in November, there were a couple plain English keys that also appeared in the root of HKCU (i.e., out of place):
“MThree Development” (see JPG attached)
and “system52216”
I use a text editor that supports UNICODE and has a Hex Viewer.
Actually, I pay no attention to the hexadecimal numbers. But this Hex Viewer also shows the values in ordinary ASCII characters on the right, even if the string was stored as UNICODE.
thanks for the ‘translation’. Interesting - it does seem as if Avast is doing something dodgy.
Omniture is a web analytics company and SiteCatalyst is one of their products. Could be that Avast is using Omniture for some sort of analytics or web tracking.
I checked in Avast and I did have ‘participate in data sharing’ and ‘participate in avast community’ enabled which I have now disabled (it didn’t remove the key from the registry though)
The strange thing is that I don’t have Avast Browser Cleanup installed.
Could it be that Avast creates the registry entries regardless whether Browser Cleanup is installed or not?
I’m bumping this, because I’d also like an answer to the last question: Is it safe to delete the mojibake keys? Or should we convert them to their ASCII equivalents? Mine are:
뻸㽷넰㽷뻸㽷d슐Ꭲ470568A
⮨學Ĕ伀텐貤,
銸ᔈ毰▃킘⩙_
㒐泛
㔲〳㐸㘴ㅟ㈱ㄵ㌷㘱㈴㔸㈳弴㐵㈰㐴㌶㈶㠹㤷㘸㐹弴灭4づ慦
As far as I can tell, I don’t have Browser Cleaner, but I don’t know how to be sure.
Also, a curiosity question for the others having this problem (which might also help Avast troubleshoot): Is your copy of Windows perchance a foreign language version (even if you are currently using English for the UI)? Or at a minimum, do you have a multi-byte language pack installed? In my case, this is a Japanese computer, originally with Japanese Windows, whose settings I changed to show English. Another thread I found by Google was a computer with Hebrew and English.