Only 5 Providers On: "Internet Mail Provider waiting for a subsystem to start"

[Solemn]

Here's a very weird glitch I found shortly after updating to 4.8.1187. As the title says, avast! only shows 5 providers running and has the Internet Mail Provider stuck on "waiting for a subsystem to start" when it normally never had to do that.  I didn't really notice this before, but after doing a defrag (using vista's built-in function) and a reboot shortly after this suddenly hit me.  A screenshot of this exact status in the On-Access menu shows this in a bit more detail.


On top of this, a weirder related problem involves trying to re-initialize or stop all the providers.  The message "Stopping Internet Mail" pops up first even though it shown to not be running at all.  Then nothing happens after that--you still see avast! with 5 providers running! This really confused me, so I waited a bit, and then sure enough all of the other 4 providers shut down as well at the same time after a significantly long wait (outlook one does not apply to this case as I wasn't running it).  After this case I tried starting up the providers again and the same deal happens--only the 5 providers activate and the Internet Mail one resumes its status of "waiting for a subsystem to start".  I will try a reboot in a bit to see if this temporarily "fixes" it, but since this was rather out of the blue, it might be harder to reproduce.  If anyone has any immediate requests for some information I'll see what I can do.  Also, there are no error messages in the avast! log viewer.

[Solemn]

Just and update on the situation: rebooted and it seems the problem is gone (for now?).  Certainly an odd issue I haven't seen before until after this update.

[rassel]

I have that problem also sometimes but it will be on after a few minutes or when i open some of the mail.(For me)
If it still not working you can reboot.

[MikeBCda]

I get the same thing, usually with Email and Web shields taking a few minutes to get going after the others.  Apparently this is somehow directly tied in to the changes in 4.8, and will (hopefully) be corrected in the next upgrade.

There's another thread or two relating to this specific behavior, if you search.

[DavidR]

Well for me the two take a little longer than with 4.7 however it doesn't take a few minutes though, less than a minute, but I generally don't check every boot. I have a few applications that are started on boot and there is no real issue waiting until avast has stopped scanning after the boot, by then all providers are running.

[Lisandro]

The Internet Mail Provider is an avast! resident provider and it is not just the corresponding service. If you have Internet Mail running and stop the "avast! Mail Scanner" service, you disable the scanning of e-mails, but you don't turn the provider into "stopped" state (rather "waiting for a subsystem to start"). Similarly, if Internet Mail is stopped, you cannot start it just by starting the "avast! Mail Scanner" service.

Did you change the way avast services load?

[Solemn]

There's another thread or two relating to this specific behavior, if you search.

Sorry bout' that, tried doing a quick search before posting this but I didn't find a lot of relevant info--I guess I'll try doing more detailed searches before making such reports.


Other than that I think I have another issue which might be related where shutting down my computer will proceed normally, except when you get to the "Shutting Down" message in Vista it kind of freezes (the spinning circle does) and stays like that for quite a while before finally turning off.

[Lisandro]

Other than that I think I have another issue which might be related where shutting down my computer will proceed normally, except when you get to the "Shutting Down" message in Vista it kind of freezes (the spinning circle does) and stays like that for quite a while before finally turning off.

Is there any useful information into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Events, specially 'Errors'?

[Solemn]

Other than that I think I have another issue which might be related where shutting down my computer will proceed normally, except when you get to the "Shutting Down" message in Vista it kind of freezes (the spinning circle does) and stays like that for quite a while before finally turning off.

Is there any useful information into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Events, specially 'Errors'?

Looked up the event viewer and it seems that nothing new has popped up for quite some time now with relation to avast! or anything else to my knowledge.

[Lisandro]

Well... it's difficult to troubleshoot due to lack of information from the system itself...

[Solemn]

Here's something interesting, after a while with no more occurrences of this problem, right after updating to 4.8.1192 I received the exact same problem here with a few more interesting observations.  Trying to start avast!'s simple user interface will result in it freezing at the splash screen where it never starts the memory scan and remains stuck at initializing it! Only 5 providers are running again where the Internet Mail scanner is stuck at waiting to initialize.  No logs are shown in the avast! log viewer or in Windows' event viewer, and when trying to shut down all the providers I get the exact same thing as before where only Internet Mail will shut down then the rest will take forever to shut down.  Looks like this tricky issue is far from resolved.


EDIT: Did a reboot, the shutdown took an extremely long time to finish for some reason but it looks like the issue is gone again (for now).  Also noticed that the reboot earlier on after the update installed produced some intense sound stuttering when Windows opened up, making me think that something's wrong with avast! and how it's handling the system resources.

[alanrf]

Solemn,

just for clarification ... are your observation based on the actions of avast immediately following the avast program update or are they occurring after (as requested by avast at the end of installation) you have restarted the system?

[Solemn]

Well this specific instance occurred on the reboot required for finalizing the install--I don't think there was anything wrong immediately after the updating finished and asked for a reboot.  However booting again after that did 'fix' the situation for now.

[Vlk]

What if you go to Administrative Tools -> Services, and try to restart the "avast! Mail Scanner" service.
Does that complete fast, or is there a lag? (normally, such a thing should take a second or two (or three), not more...).

[Solemn]

What if you go to Administrative Tools -> Services, and try to restart the "avast! Mail Scanner" service.
Does that complete fast, or is there a lag? (normally, such a thing should take a second or two (or three), not more...).

Did this, and it did refresh as intended--but keep in mind that I did such a procedure while I was no longer experiencing anything odd since the reboot later on made it 'go away'.  I checked the avast log viewer again and it looks like I have this bit of information though:

Code: [Select]

07/05/2008 5:43:09 PM SYSTEM 1708 Automatic rootkit scan was not started as it didn't complete successfully during the last run.