As far as taking a picture, it's just too fast.
As far as AVG, I had 7.5 and they were pushing so hard for me to buy the next one, I mean it appeared by how they referred to what I had that they were discontinuing their free product.
Now for the "solution" to my situation or at least so far it seems to be....
Scanned the system with Avast and a2squared, nothing found.
I began wondering if something in the patch changed how Avast relates to firewalls.
Low and behold the problem is that my firewall comodo is triggering avast and Avast is triggering my firewall too.
So, after excluding each program and restarting a few times, making adjustments where I can, I discovered I had to set avast Web Shield to exclude battle.net so it doesn't trigger comodo and, in comodo, I had to further authorize a component of Avast and Warcraft III to not trigger avast.
Understand that Warcraft had a file that used to trigger Avast, and there was much web controversy over it 8 years ago when Warcraft III came out, the file triggered numerous virus scanners then also. It also did some sort of odd internet access when you launch the program that notified Blizzard it was being run (if you had an internet connection available).
In fact a few weeks ago I believe Avast found one of the Warcraft III install files "sfnt.dll" or something similarly named contained a trojan. This file installed from the original CD and was required for the program to recognize the CD was in the drive. This has since been fixed, yet even a2squared still finds that file infected on a scan. And to confuse things further, Blizzard has since made the file unnecessary (it was part of the requirement you have the original CD in the drive, their copy protection).
In any event, when launching Warcraft III there is the engine and basically a "front" file, one for Reign of Chaos and one for The Frozen Throne. Both call warcraft.exe and comodo requires authorization of all of them. Where it gets weird is if not authorized then this triggers Avast!
However even authorized the minimizing continued until I also excluded battle.net from the Webshield component of Avast. This may be entirely rare however I know Avast gets triggered when a2squared finds something also, and that this phenomenon occurred with AVG as well. Rootkit Revealer also has triggered the same virus scanners when it finds a rootkit issue but the virus scanner didn't intercept it originally. This is just to explain the tenor of my original post.
Quick review of the last 2 months may also be in order...
I had installed xp sp3 but had to uninstall it since shortly thereafter I kept losing my internet connection, my cable internet connection, and this required a restart to re-establish the connection. Of course rolling back couldn't be a simple restore to return to sp2....No I had to run all these "cmd" files after I had to re-install the windows setup program, something about registering in the "mmc" I think it's called. This I discovered when I couldn't scan, or install downloaded updates from the Microsoft update website by autoupdate.
Okay so then there is Firefox 2.0.0.15 which would distort and break up web pages such as newegg.com, an often frequented computer products site. Of course I downloaded the prior version 2.0.0.14 and re-installed that, and then had to make adjustments to Firefox to not check the update server nor do an automatic update. Long story short it's an adjustment made using the url entry line of firefox, an internal preferences file it brings up. Changing autoupdates to not update through the menu doesn't work so every time I ran Firefox I was prompted for the latest and greatest update that doesn't work as well as it used to.
Okay so then I start my weekly Avast scan and it didn't work, continually stopping at the same file count and wouldn't finish. Naturally I downloaded a new copy of Avast and re-installed, and with that came the update and the problems I described earlier began then.
Though I don't hope it on anyone else I am sure others have had worse situations. My purpose at this point is to thank those who sought to help me out, it's greatly appreciated, and to set forth why it is so greatly appreciated. These last 2 months have been a sort of hell for me and it seems that coders anymore don't write with any pride or integrity in their work, they just want their paycheck, to put in enough time coding to get them paid. Many may find that reasonable and maybe it is.
Consider though that only 30 years ago we wrote code for the sake of seeing what we could do, what we could make the processor and computer do, and we often sought to write from scratch in the interest of perfecting our talents.
Today we rely on what we're told by those who make this compiler or that engine that makes our development of whatever we are writing easier. Of course their bug is our bug and coders seem much too ready to pass along inability to fix the situation due to being reliant on whoever makes whatever "tool" we are using.
It saddens me to see this going on. Microsoft tech support referring to program bugs as "unimplemented features" based on a code where customer service then directs us to an "implementing link" to download a patch. This along with how so many software companies use the intangibility of computer software as an opportunity to diminsh the quality of what is produced, their "accept" license achieves this legal firewall to any sort of genuine quality assurance, I mean compare software to what you expect buying an automobile, kitchen appliances, etc. Computers manage our financial lives, that's why hackers and such see them as targets, and yet we seem all too willing to accept whatever we're given.
As an analogy consider if you'd buy an automobile in 1995 and then purchase the same model and make of automobile in 1998 after learning "they fixed 3000+ defects in the previous one" (windows bugs analogy). Each iteration of windows the number of bugs "fixed" is a greater number. What's worse is that we excuse it away for the most part once we are told how many lines of code are in the program (20 million for XP I believe).
I do not mean to ramble. I do mean to express how much I appreciate that this forum was helpful, that Avast is free, and maybe these developers as well as others developing a product who happen across this post may re-discover the "charm" of computers and their relationship to us, the user: as our tool and not our master.
At this point I want to post this to Comodo as well since they are looking for input as to conflicts.
My apologies for my nostalgia, every industry starts with excitement and invention only to become more routine and less and less reliant on ingenuity, on differences and seeing the "market" as people and not cattle.
Thank you for reading and for all the help I have received, it is most gracious of you,
B.
