Virus definition release date doesn't seem to update

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi

A few days back, on March 31st, Windows 10 told me, that Avast’s virus definitions were not up to date. I checked, and they seemed to be a week old (released March 24th). I clicked the Update button to update, Avast checked and right away told me, that the definitions were up to date.

I tried checking for updates a few more times with no success. I then went to the Windows app menu, chose Avast and the Repair option. Avast repaired and told me everything was OK.

I rebooted and tried to update again. Still no luck.

I then downloaded Awast from the website, uninstalled the installed version of Avast, rebooted and reinstalled using the version of Avast I had downloaded.

Everything now worked fine. The virus definition release date was March 31st and over the next days it updated fine… until April 3rd.

Now what happens (and this MIGHT be the thing that happened before as well, as I didn’t check the Virus definition version number) is that Avast DOES update the Virus Definitions (this morning I had version 170404-3 and to check I have just manually updated to version 170405-0).

On this page https://www.avast.com/virus-update-history, I can see that version 170404-0 was released on April 4th (no further releases are listed at the time I write this), so my virus definitions are either from April 4th or April 5th.

However, the release date in Avast is still listed as April 3rd at 9:05:32!

The only setting I have touched in Avast between April 3rd and now is that I deactivated Cybercapture yesterday, as it sometimes seems to make opening files etc. slower on my computer. I have now reactivated it, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the virus definition release date.

Have anyone encountered this problem or have suggestions for a solution?

As it is now, Windows will start in a few days telling me that Avast is out of date, and I really don’t want to uninstall and reinstall once every week to keep this bug from my door.

ADDED: I just tried downloading the manual virus definition updater from here: https://www.avast.com/download-update. I ran it, it said the product had been updated, but when I check, the release date still has not been changed.

2

In the past, an avast Repair has resolved this out of sync issue, e.g. what is reported/displayed as being different to that actually on the system. This could also account for why avast itself isn’t saying it is out of date.

Control Panel > Programs and Features > Avast Antivirus > Change - from the next screen select Repair, once complete reboot.

This is somewhat quicker than a reinstall.

3

I just tried repairing Avast and then rebooting as you described, but the error is still there (virus definitions version from today but release date displayed as April 3rd).

I then tried manually downloading the latest deifinitions from Avast’s site and installing them, but with the same result.

This COULD be, because the installer in both Avast and the manual installer only checks whether I need to update, and since I have the latest version, no update is made and so the release date is also not updated. The only way to check this is to wait until a new version of the virus definition file is released.

This error has never happened until now, and I have had Avast installed since October last year when I bought the computer. Now it has happened twice within around a week. Just as an extra precaution I ran a check with Malwarebytes and it came up clean.

4

Have a look in the C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\defs folder and see what VPS files that are shown.

You should also be getting the streaming updates (?) which should keep you well up to date as the VPS updates contain the collated streaming updates since the last VPS update.

5

Hi

Thanks for taking your time helping me with this.

I looked in the folder and it has several (12) subfolders starting from April 3rd, which interestingly also is the date that is wrongly displayed as last update date in Avast.

I have streaming updates activated.

The four newest subfolders are (newest on top):
17040500_stream
17040500
17040403_stream
17040403

The folder also contains a file called “aswdefs.ini”. I took a look inside it, and it only has two lines reading:

[Definitions]
Latest=17040300

Could this be the culprit? I would have expected it to read “Latest=17040500”.

6

Added:

OK, I seem to have solved the problem, but whether this is a real solution or just cosmetic, and the problem will reappear, I don’t know yet.

What I did was this:

  1. I copied aswdefs.ini to the desktop and modified it to show the correct latest definition (17040500 in stead of 17040300)
  2. I then disabled Avast’s self-defence module (in the troubleshooting tab under settings) and copied the file to it’s original position, overwriting the existing file (I had to do this as an administator)
  3. I then reactivated Avast’s self defence module and rebooted
  4. Once rebooted I went to the virus definitions folder. When I “arrived”, Avast was already in the process of deleting old virus definitions folders, leaving only the latest (“17040500”) as well as a streaming update (“17040500_stream”).

When I now look at Avast’s update menu, the date for latest update displays correctly.

So… it seems that Avast DOES update my virus definitions, but for some reason sometimes it doesn’t update the aswdefs.ini file, and this remains messed up, until you manually change the file to the correct date.

Is there a way to report this to Avast?

7

Nice hack to combat the incorrect display of the VPS, ordinarily I would have expected the avast repair to have resolved it.

But what I’m seeing in this system is the avast housekeeping is a bit tardy with lots of VPS sub folders, most empty, but that is on 12.3.2280 as I have yet to update this win10 laptop. I will have to check this on my other system with 17.3.2291 later.

Some of those empty VPS folders have just one file SWCUEngine.dll this I haven’t seen in the past.

EDIT: This lack of housekeeping only appears to be going on with the 12.3.2280 and not in my 17.3.2291 version on my XP Pro System.

8

Hi Jakob K H,

I’ve notified our WinDev team so hopefully it gets fixed soon :slight_smile:

Jiri

9

Thank you.

The support in this forum is great! :slight_smile:

10

You’re welcome, hopefully it won’t take too long to fix.

11

I hope so too.

The problem didn’t go away by changing the aswdefs.ini file. Now it just stands at April 5th even though I have received two large updates (17040502 and 17040600).

Another annoying thing is, that with this issue, Avast doesn’t delete the old virus definitions folders, and since a non-streamed folder takes up more than 100 MB, they will very quickly start up taking A LOT of space on the harddisk.

12

Hi everybody,

any chance there is a more permanent fix already existing for this issue?
I have the version 17.9.2322 (newest build) and this problem still occurs.

Thanks