Avast upgrade broke my Windows

[bgowland]

It sounds unlikely I know but that appears to be the case.

Monday evening, Avast popped up a notification telling me a new version of the program was available (the actual binaries, not just the virus defs). I installed it and everything seemed fine for about an hour when I was browsing a web site with Chrome and dragged the scroll bar down and the 'page' just went completely grey. I tried refreshing but still just a grey page. I could change tabs but again, opening new pages or refreshing open ones produced a grey page. I closed Chrome and tried to re-open but was told there were insufficient system resources. Task Manager stats didn't confirm this - I had plenty of free RAM and the processor usage was low (10-20%).

I then tried Outlook Express which was already open and tried to open an email which I'd viewed about 10 minutes earlier - the email window opened but displayed a message saying it couldn't display the content. I closed OE and tried to start it again and was again told there weren't enough system resources.

At this point things started going really weird - the desktop icons all lost their text labels, popups were showing as blank grey rectangles with buttons with no text and so on. I began to suspect my ancient AGP graphics card so shutdown and removed it and switched to the mobo's on-board graphics, rebooted and everything was fine....for about an hour and exactly the same symptoms appeared.

I scheduled a full boot-time chkdsk for the system drive and rebooted (nothing significant was found) and ran a memory check (no problems). The machine booted into Windows and I checked Chrome and OE worked fine then closed them and left the PC at the Windows desktop doing nothing and went to watch TV for a couple of hours. When I came back, nothing would start (insufficient resources message etc) so basically it had developed the same problems just sitting idle without me doing anything.

It hadn't occurred to me Avast might be the problem (I've been using it for about 2 years and never had issues) but that was the only significant change to my setup on Monday. I rebooted to get things working again, downloaded AVG Free, un-installed Avast, rebooted and installed AVG. That was about 16 hours ago and I haven't seen the problems since.

I Googled to see if there were any known issues with the last update to Avast but couldn't find anything (admittedly I didn't search too far). All I can think is the update process went wrong and something subtle was broken - after all AV software hooks itself in to low-level parts of the OS as well as email/web apps.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post but I just thought I'd share. If your PC starts doing bizarre things, try disabling or un-installing your AV software - you never know.

Cheers,
Brian

[stustunz]

My "n" key stopped working last night. Thought the keyboard was stuffed changed keyboard and still didnt work, Capital "N" worked fine.
Restarted and my "n" works again

Nothing like your story but still weird bloody computers

[Lao Pan]

Upgraded 3 computers with avast last week and on two of them I had to then uninstall Chrome - on restarting the computer a splash screen appears which gives you about 1 second to untick the "install chrome" box before proceeding to install it :mad: To me this is the worst type of viral loading of an installer I have seen - not to be expected from what was a good AV program. There should at least be a next button after this step.
On Googling this problem I came across several posts from people who had had their original chrome installs obliterated by this behaviour - apparently it performs a non standard install. Maybe this was what was causing your problems.
Me I don't want Chrome anywhere near my computer so at least give me a chance to say no.

[martint123]

I've just done the upgrade on my main personal machine.
The Chrome question was there on the normal install screen, giving plenty of time to read and untick it.

SO far I haven't had any other oddties, but only been running with it for a couple of hours.

[mvallevand]

Anti-virus programs are notorious for problems, probably because they update so often and have a lot of control over the system. I use KAV and I remember one morning after one update, my PC would work because of a bad dll. Fortunately this was fixed with a follow-up dll automatically downloaded. I think it was McAfee that bricked a few computer with one update in the last couple of years.

The incident I remember most was when Google was marking all sites as un-safe, but that is only #5 on this list http://www.cracked.com/article_19519_5-t...sters.html

Martin

[martint123]

I spoke too soon earlier. All my external network connectivity has gone tits up.
restored from last weeks C: backup and all is well.

[HarryH3]

I was bitten by the "black screen" problem that's been reported by many users on the Avast forums. I let the update install and then rebooted and went to take a shower. Came back to a black screen with just a cursor. I could move the cursor but couldn't do anything else. Booted into Safe Mode fine. Try to uninstall avast and get a message that the uninstall file was invalid. Great. Did a system restore back a couple of days and rebooted again. STILL having the black screen! Went to another PC to check the avast forums for a possible solution. I just happened to be logged into the Team Viewer client on that system and got a popup notification when the "dead" system became available via Team Viewer. I then connected just fine via Team Viewer and there was my login screen, but the resolution and aspect ratio seemed odd. So I checked the display properties and discover that the TV I use as a 2nd display sometimes had been set to be my MAIN display. I wasn't seeing anything because the TV wasn't turned on! Argh!!! Avast does seem to have been uninstalled, despite the invalid uninstall file warning, so I'm using MSE for now.

[ACTCMS]

Has anyone installed the latest update (7.0.1456 according to my system) without problems?

I've got three machines pestering me to update.

Alex

[Lao Pan]

Yes - Updated fine on two out of three.
First one Vista 32 bit - I just managed to untick the chrome box before it continued (could be gaming mode causing this?) Reboots etc seem snappier and no firefox unresponsive problems. - Also no longer completing install and offering Chrome on every reboot

Second one Vista 64 even waited for me to click "Finnish" after I had unticked Chrome

Third One Vista 32 Office machine had a problem with Outlook 2007 reporting a serious problem with the Avast add-in. - in the end (clean reinstall of avast no help) disabled the add in in outlook re booted and then re-enabled it in the outlook trust center and all is now all is fine