Avast 7 .1407 hangs Vista64 at shutdown

[The Kitchen Sink]

Regarding the machine that has the small problem:

Laptop
Windows Vista 64 Home Premium SP2
4gb RAM


The problem:
When shutting the machine down. The system will hang and will remain on the windows "shutting down" screen. The system looks and even behaves as if it completely shut everything down, but the problem is that is never does. I do not get this every time I shut down the machine. Sometimes it shuts down normally. Sometimes not and it hangs. I have to press the physical button to force it to turn off.

When I start the system after forced shut off. It behaves as if it were a normal shutdown. It only does this after updating to Avast 7. While not a huge problem. It should NOT hang the system even at shutdown.

There is no way for me to determine what Avast 7 is doing either as it is randomly doing this and obviously no controls during "shutting down" screen.

[igor]

Would you be able (and willing) to try to create and upload a dump taken at the moment the system got frozen? I'm not sure if the dump creation would work at that moment, but chances are it could.

The description on how to prepare the magical shortcut is here: https://support.avast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=71
Note: the description is valid if your machine has a PS/2 keyboard, which I believe it quite likely if it's a laptop.

If you have an external USB keyboard connected, the registry key would be different - instead of "i8042prt", there would be "kbdhid" (appart from that, all the same).

Thanks.

[The Kitchen Sink]

To be honest fiddling around with that stuff scares me a little and more to the point. I cannot get the hang every time =(

I mean, that is a good thing. But I have no idea what(besides avast 7) causes the "shutting down" bug. Maybe if someone else has the same problem they could feel more confident in trying that?

I do appreciate the response though Igor. Very fast and nice of you =)

Edit:
I suspect that it hangs at shut down perhaps because of the trigger that turns the system off. For some reason Avast7 may not like it or does something regarding it and it cannot turn itself off normally. But this is speculation and the problem is random...sometimes it works....sometimes not.

[oklajohn]

I am having the same problem on Windows 7 x64 pc.  I was not having shutdown problem before upgrade to avast! 7.  Now randomly, I get hang at shutdown....hope we can find a resolution for this.   

[igor]

The same question... would it be possible for you to try to create a dump - at the moment the machine is frozen at shutdown?
Thanks.

[oklajohn]

I will try - it only hangs spasmodically, so I'm not sure when this might occur. 

[igor]

I understand... when you enter the registry key, you just enable the special shortcut (after reboot).
So whenever in the future it happens, you are ready (provided the shortcut will still work at that shutdown phase).

[stan-i-lund]

Right. I'll try the crash for memorydump with ctrl-scroll lock and post the zipped dump file when it happens next time. On my computer (AMD triplecore, Win7 sp1 64bit) the hang on shutdown seems to appear mainly after several hours of heavy usage, with lots of javascript testing in firefox. The javascript checking component is new, isn't it?

[igor]

No, not really, it's been present in the last 6 build as well.
There were some improvements, but I don't think it's related. Preventing the system from shutdown indicates a problem in a driver, while the Script Shield is mostly user mode stuff.

[stan-i-lund]

Well now I just had a hang. Made the "memory.dmp" and am uploading it to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming . It seems to take one hour before the upload will be complete, though the file is compressed it has the size of approx. 448 MB.