I’ve been having to repair client machines where the WGA notification is suddenly declaring that the OS is pirated even though it is all legal.
Two of the WGA files have been renamed or deleted.
The only common denominator we can find is the use of avast pro/home. Apparently there was an update notification in the shutdown menu even though automatic updates had been turned off.
Have any of you come across this problem too?
Thanks for your input
I certainly haven’t seen anything in the forums about this.
avast doesn’t undertake autonomous actions like rename or delete user input is required for the Home version and in the Pro version you can set action on detection, but in the case of avast 4 home, the user would first have received an alert of an infected file. The pro user may not depending on how they set things up to react on detection. The key I guess is that these files would frist have to have been detected as infected in some way for any deletion or rename action to be taken.
This can be checked to see if a WGA file was detected as infected by checking the avast log viewer (right click the avast ‘a’ icon) and check the Warning section.
You can turn of the auto updates, however, the program updates are normally set to Ask so you would be notified if one is available asking if you want to install it now. I don’t know about it being shown in the shutdown menu though, do you happen to have a screen shot ?
Hi, thanks for looking at this.
You know how things go - everything happens so fast you don’t think of taking a screen shot!
I’m sure that it’s got nothing to do with avast, the only problem is that out of the 7 machines on which this has happened the only known common denominator is avast being installed. Spyware scans don’t find anything either.
I’ll investigate the log in avast as you suggest.
I can’t see a relationship between avast (or any other software) and WGA except Microsoft itself.
Did you try Windows Update site and get the latest ones?