Malware like behaviour

studiot · Sep 3, 2010

For those who may be interested

Avast (free) is often recommended here.

I recently encountered a problem with Avast pro (the paid for version) that may well also be applicable to other AV products.

I had a PC (XPpro) with Avast Pro that would not let Avast run a scan. It took about 90 seconds to even open the Avast control window.

However the PC ran like lightning in every other respect. I was unable to uncover any malware on it.

Likewise the Avast team was also unable to uncover any malware.
They recommended uninstall using their tool and reinstall, which I did.

Unfortunately that made no difference to the problem.

Eventually I discovered that some log database files written by Avast had become corrupt so it could not use them.

More to the point the uninstaller did not recognise them so it did not uninstall them and they remained to interfere with any reinstall.

Deleting them made all well again.

Hope this helps someone.

chaslang · Sep 3, 2010

Thanks for the info.

studiot said: ↑

Eventually I discovered that some log database files written by Avast had become corrupt so it could not use them.

More to the point the uninstaller did not recognise them so it did not uninstall them and they remained to interfere with any reinstall.
Click to expand...

This is why when we uninstall things we get additional followup logs from MGtools so we can attempt to cleanup all the junk the all these programs leave around. They almost NEVER cleanup after themselves properly. Even when you run their own uninstallers, they may still leave things laying around.

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Malware like behaviour

studiot MajorGeek

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member