Re. excluding drives, there are two exclusion lists, on-demand (Program Settings, Exclusions) and on-access, (Standard Shield, Customize, Advanced, Add), the first has no impact on the second. If you did add it correctly to the standard shield (totally inadvisable, as you are unprotected), then I would have to ask what was the path you put in to exclude the drives ?
I discovered that on-demand exclusion has no effect on resident protection just after writing the post
I've just tried now. I'm using ?:* as a path (it seems to exclude all drives as expected).
About leaving me unprotected: I have to do it, because I can't do anything with my pc until I disable avast. Indeed, I'm going to uninstall the software again after writing this post.
But I'm not too worried, I only got a single virus warning from avast in several years (when deleting a suspect file
). I'm quite paranoid about security.
Did you try what I suggested on 'Show detailed info on performed actions' to see what is/was being scanned ?
Yes, as I said before NO FILE is being scanned when ashServ starts sucking processor time. After boot I see several yellow popups in the bottom-right corner, when msoffice quickstart, etc. get executed. Then I wait 120 seconds. During that time a few more popups appear, but when the task manager shows ashServ rising to 100% cpu no poupup appears and the the "A" icon is still.
After adding all drives to the on-access exclusion list I get no yellow popup and no icon rotation AT ALL, so I assume the scanning process is not directly responsible for the high cpu usage (but see below).
I would suggest a clean reinstall and see if that resolves the problem because for some reason the standard shield seems to have stalled
I already did that, two times. Both times I uninstalled using the normal uninstaller, restarted, then used the uninstall utility and restarted again, just to be sure.
The strange thing is that ashServ uses 100% cpu even when standard shield is NOT running. But, in the latter case, the system is just slower than usual instead of utterly unresponsive as when standard shield is running.
Second strange thing: after approx. 15 minutes cpu usage drops to normal levels. Then I can freely turn on or off standard shield and nothing changes (until I restart windows).
But if I stop and restart the "avast! antivirus" service from administrative tools > services, then after another 120 seconds cpu usage jumps to 100% again.