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Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: First John on February 18, 2005, 11:02:07 PM

Title: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 18, 2005, 11:02:07 PM

HIi: I had this appended to somone else's thread, & thought it might
be better if I started another thread specific to this problem.

I am back using avast again, V4.5 (very recently downloaded).

3 times today my system crashed.  I was using QuickPar to repair a large download.
& at the same time I was moving some small files from a DVDrom to my hardrive.

I went to the watercloset, came back, & MS was doing a repair scan of my HD.

I let things reboot, & started over with the Quickpar repair & the file moving,
piucked up my book, found my place where I left off, & boom, down she goes,
reboot, longer repair time.  And again the third time, downloading files, & doing
a Quickpar repair.

From past observations, if this happens 2 more times I am dead in the water.
Please let me know what log files you need, & how to configure Avast 4 home to
produce those logs.

I am running a gigabyte MB with an athlonn 2400 all software updates.
768 meg of ram (3*256 meg, all tested fine) no memory shortage by my
memory monitor.

Thanks

First John

a quick follow up, i scanned everything using spybot, & nothing seems to be lurking.
I just had another crash, copying files from a dvdrom, nothing else happening that I
have started.  I grabbed a folder with 700 or so folders, 4-10 files in each.  It ran for
roughly 200 of the folders, then crashed.

Could there be too much activity & Avast simply shuts everything down?

I will try closing my firewall & disabling avast & see where that goes.

Just got back from shutting off my firewall, & disabling Avast.
The dvd copied flawlessly,  no hiccups, nothing.  Then when I
went to enable Avast I got a error from windows explorer that
there was a corrupled message in Avast & windows explorer
crashed.

Any suggerstions would be nice?


First John




 
 
 

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: pk on February 18, 2005, 11:45:24 PM

Hello John,
please look at \program files\alwil software\avast4\data\log directory for unp* files - are there any from time when your crash has occured ? Or was that blue-screen crash ? If yes, look at \windows\minidump folder. Thanks.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 19, 2005, 02:28:33 AM

Please, with what do I open the mini dump files?


First John

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: Eddy on February 19, 2005, 11:14:51 AM

You don't have to open them, just tell pk if there are any of such files and if so if one (or more) are dated/timed at the same time of the crashes.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: pk on February 19, 2005, 11:20:32 AM

FirstJohn: as Eddy said, if they're dated at time where your computer could crash, send me them on my email. Thanks.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 19, 2005, 03:59:51 PM

Ok! I just forwarded 3 files via email...............

Thanks
John

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: pk on February 19, 2005, 04:37:42 PM

Thanks for minidumps - but it looks like hardware (memory ?) problem (e.g. one crash appeared when system wanted to free memory) - time among those 3 crashes was quite little (20hours) - every one on different place, did you do a hardware changes ?

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: Vlk on February 19, 2005, 04:38:16 PM

pk, can you get me the dumps, too?

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 19, 2005, 09:57:54 PM

no hardware changes, & I'm running a small memory monitor,
it shows me running with 300 - 400 meg free, even just before
the crashing...

If it looks like a bad Simm/Dimm, I'll start removing them 1 at a time.
until the bad one shows up...

First John.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: Vlk on February 19, 2005, 10:01:54 PM

That would definitely be helpful. :)
I'd LOVE to know if this really is a hardware problem or not.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: pk on February 19, 2005, 10:05:14 PM

how do you dare to doubt ? :D

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: Vlk on February 19, 2005, 10:07:00 PM

Because the 2nd minidump is the crash I've been chasing for YEARS - the aswMon2!DestroyPathHashEntries one.
I'd love to have confirmed that those crashes are indeed caused by faulty RAM (or other hw problem)...

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: pk on February 19, 2005, 10:14:27 PM

That function is called every 10mins, the calling in 2nd minidump was the first one after reboot - ok, it may not mean anything, but how do you explain 1st and 3rd dump - different places/in memory fncs; i dont think he was a victim of your famous mysterious bug ;). We'll see.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 20, 2005, 01:59:20 AM

The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little bit longer    ;D


I'm working night shift tonight, & will be brain dead for a day or 2.
However I will also start swappoing out ram.  I will pull out all the
ram from this machine & put in the 512K from my other unit & see
how that goes,  if there is no problems, I will add in another 256
at random & see what happens.

Meanwhile, one of my workmates is experiencing the start of what I
am going through, his problems on a brand new HP notebook.

First John

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: Eddy on February 20, 2005, 03:24:59 AM

There is a util which may be helpfull to you to test the mem
Memtest86 (http://www.memtest86.com/)

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 20, 2005, 04:12:00 PM

I'm also going to do something that caused previous crashes,
& see if I can get you any more of those log files.  If 2-3 all said
the same thing, it should be fairly obvious.


I dl'd the memtest & will give that a run too.

Thanks

First John

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 21, 2005, 03:58:18 PM

Silly Question?   ;D

how long does the memtest run?
I ran it for 8 hours on my secondary machine,
4 hours on this machine & it seems like the
EverReady Bunny, It just Keeps going......and Going...
no problems found in memory.

Should I let it run for days?

First John

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: pk on February 21, 2005, 04:04:27 PM

I guess there's advanced options in menu and test no.11 should be the best - maybe it'd be better to switch your memory for 1-2 days.

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: Vlk on February 21, 2005, 04:25:30 PM

By default, it runs indefinitely... but we probably don't have so much time do we? ;D

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on February 24, 2005, 04:03:06 AM

Then I would have to hazard the opinion that there is nothing wrong with my me ;Dmory

(what was I saying?  ???)

Title: Re: Avast crashing my system
Post by: First John on March 02, 2005, 10:55:28 AM

I have been having all sorts of browser failures, etc,
tried running in safe mode & had more of the same.

I went to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer/
& found some very interesting stuff:

Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2800.1106, faulting module xvid.dll, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x00047d0f.


I uninstalled the xvid codec & so far things seem a little more stable.

I will do further investigating in the morning.

First John