I figure I would start a new topic for this one because I have noticed something peculiar that perhaps others have noticed as well.
Over the last few days I have noticed that around the same time of the afternoon (between 12:30 pm and 1:00 pm my time, EST) that when I went to check the Update area of Avast UI I would get the red warning indicating that my Virus definitions are not up to date. However, the time stamp on my definitions would still be whatever the latest streaming update was, and going into the defs folder in program files I had the latest timestamped .bin files in the latest streaming updates subfolder. Manually clicking “Check up Updates” appears to “fix” this issue, and it’ll update to the next signature set (currently 231223-4) and the text would go green and I would be up to date until I would check again at round roughly the same time the following day. Today I tried running a Repair but that didn’t do anything
Now it’s obviously possible that this could be happening throughout the day as I’m not looking at it literally all day, but of the times I do check and see this red warning, It’s only at around this time of day. I wonder if this is related to the Avast overseer task which is scheduled to run at 12:20 pm daily, so I will have to check tomorrow again and see if it starts showing up at 12:20 pm.
Does anyone else see this? Anyone (preferably an Avast team member) have any insight? Is this another UI bug like the one from last month?
So this appears to be related to the Overseer task. The red warning shows up after the Overseer is run in Task Scheduler. A manual Check for Updates “fixes” this issue and the text turns green and then i’m good until the next time the Overseer task runs, which is once every 24 hours and also on System Startup. I did restart my computer though just now, and the task did not run again even though it is supposed to run at System Startup it did run eventually a bit later. The Emergency Update task did run on System startup though.
After some more monitoring, it appears that this is related to whether you have the most up-to-date available signature package at the time the overseer task runs. As some of you know, you don’t always get the most up to date signature package downloaded and installed and a lot of the time throughout the day the streaming updates will just be used until some arbitrary time when Avast feels like fully upgrading you to the most up to date signatures. Each time that red warning shows up, my current signature package is not the most up to date. At some point (in the case of yesterday about 20 minutes later) the signature package will update on its own to the most recent version and you’re all good.
I tested it today by manually checking for virus definitions updates a few minutes before the Overseer task was scheduled to run, and it upgraded to the most up to date package (checked against my Program Files ‘defs’ folder), and when the overseer task ran, no red warning showed up.
So, I guess this is “normal” then? I have never noticed this before, but then again I likely wasn’t checking at the exact time the overseer task ran or a few minutes after and as a result didn’t happen to see it. Or perhaps previously the overseer task was running at a time when I wasn’t using my computer (it runs every 24 hours but will change on re-installs and repairs).