I have just upgraded to Avast Antivirus Free 17, and got once again the unwanted anti-spam toolbar in MS Outlook 2003 : no warning given, no questions asked, no option to uninstall in Components.
Exactly like when I “upgraded” to version 16. I had delayed upgrading to 17, fearing that it might break something, and here we are. Again this very old problem. Mentioned here by myself :
And in countless other threads before. See the screenshot in my 2016 post, it’s exactly the same thing now. Any ideas to nix that toolbar from Outlook ? And to prevent it from reappearing at the next upgrade ?
Thank you, Pondus. The Techwalla solution does not work, because the Avast toolbar does not appear as an add-in in the relevant section of Outlook. The others… well, I’ve tried many of them, which don’t work.
In the meantime, I dug into my notes and found something that works, so I’m sharing it here in case it helps. Settings / Troubleshooting / Enable Avast Self-defence Module = No
Delete, rename or move away the two different asOutExt.dll files you will find 1) at the root of Avast install folder, 2) in the folder called x64.
That’s it. It’s probably the method I used when I was caught after “upgrading” to v.16. Still, this obnoxiousness of Avast insisting that you “upgrade” just to foist unwanted “enhancements” upon you (and forcing you to re-learn the user interface, with new names for the same functions) is beyond irritating.
Oh, and also : this method gets rid of the Avast anti-spam toolbar in Outlook 2003, but does it break the mail shield function in other ways ? I’ll have to rely that it does not.