AVG Free 7.5 and MSVCR71.DLL

I recently installed AVG Free 7.5.476 on a friend's machine that is running Windows 98SE. The install, the update, and the building of a Rescue Disk set were uneventful.

Then I let it run a full scan. It first found and identified C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MSVCR71.DLL as a threat, but without identifying any particular virus or other reason for the presumed threat. Later, it found an infected zipfile in the e-mail attachment folder. No other sign of infection was found.

At the conclusion of the scan, AVG Free said that it had deleted the infected attachment and healed the system file, and that a reboot was required to complete the process. On re-starting, I got a message that an unidentified program could not start because MSVCR71.DLL was missing. I soon found that trying to open AVG's Control Centre or Virus Vault also failed with a "MSVCR71.DLL missing" message, and the other AVG components would not respond at all. AVG's icon does not appear in the System Tray.

There are indications on the Web that MSVCR71.DLL is used by several progams, including MS Office 2003 and .NET. While MS Office 97 is installed on the machine, it seems unaffected by the absence of MSVCR71.DLL. MS .NET is not installed. I have not found any other programs on the machine that are affected by the absence of MSVCR71.DLL.

Before allowing AVG to take action on the files it found, I looked at MSVCR71.DLL in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. The filedate and time was the same as the AVG files just installed, i.e, that day. After re-starting, MSVCR71.DLL was no longer present in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. It had not been healed; it had disappeared entirely. I do not know if it was present in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM prior to installing AVG.

I tried using Windows' SFC to replace MSVCR71.DLL from the Windows 98 CD-ROM. SFC did not find that file. There were no other copies of MSVCR71.DLL anywhere on the hard drive.

The system has no other security software installed. NAV and Trend Micro's PC-Cillin were installed at some time in the past, but have been uninstalled. Some of their folders are still present on the machine.

It appears that AVG Free ate one of its own files. :confused I could remove and re-install AVG Free -- but how would I prevent it from doing the same thing again?

 

Does downloading and installing from here help-
http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?msvcr71

I thought Avg7.5 support was discontinued!?

Why not use AVG v8.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/AVG_AntiVirus_Free_Edition_d886.html

Cheers...

 

Yikes!!! Me thinks AVG v8 not compatible with Win98. Sorry my bad :-o

 

You're right -- v7.5 is the last version of AVG that is supported by Win9x.

And true -- AVG has discontinued support for that version. But they're still providing virus signature updates for it.