Better fix for Corel Photo House 3 & 5 launch problem caused by Avast!

Better fix for Corel Photo House 3 & 5 launch problem caused by Avast!

Hello fellow geeks, may this info help someone else.

I run WinXPpro SP3 (fully patched) on my 1.8GHz Pentium4 computer. My Corel Photo House 3 stopped being able to launch after I switched from AVG to (Version 8 Free of) Avast!. Photo House 5 also had the error launching.

PhotoHse 3 in compatability mode W98/ME, and W95 gives the error: SmartHeap Library MEM_BAD_POINTER
PhotoHse in compatibility mode W2K, and NT4.0SP5: Corel Photo House has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

http://coreldraw.com/forums/p/18901/81668.aspx re SmartHeap Library MEM_BAD_POINTER suggested trying the compatibility window's "Disable visual themes" and/or "Advanced Text Services" checkboxes, but those didn't help either.

I asked Avast!'s tech support for help and they helped me along toward a solution. (Thanks, Avast!.)

(Version 8 Free of) Avast!'s Behavior Shield seems to be the problem. Stopping it lets Photo House launch and run. That's better than stopping all the shields, but still not a good security practice. Turning the shield off and on just to launch an application is bothersome. Leaving the shield off is dangerous.

THE BETTER WAY: Bring up Avast!'s user interface. Choose the SECURITY tab. On the ANTIVIRUS menu, click Behavior Shield. Click the Settings button. Choose Trusted Processes from the menu. Browse and add photohse.exe . The full program path name should show; I had to add PhotoHouse3 and PhotoHouse5 separately.

Photo House should launch happily now with Avast! active.

KGHN

(Earlier posts about this are at: Corel Photo House 3 Problem started by crusoe89.)

 

I wonder how many avast! conflicts could be solved using this method. Thanks!