I ran AIS for a while to test the 6.0 firewall until all seemed to be in pretty good shape. So I went to the installer and unchecked the FW, installed OA++ with no problems and everything was running without a hitch. I had learned that trying to go back to the AIS FW shredded the installer and installation, so already planned a remove and reinstall for the next version of the AIS FW to test.
So today I got another beta of OA, and decided to do a simple install over the one already there. Boy was I wrong. Avast! would not load at all, it took two boots to get a screen, internet didn't work, ... Tried restoring, removing and installing just AVast!, ... Finally a complete removal and reinstall of both Avast! and OA got things working again. This time it was Avast! Pro.
So rather than just complaining about the installer and the &%#@ conflicts between security software, a reminder that when there is some conflict suspected, it may take a complete cleanout and redo of both products to get things working again. And we have also been seeing more installation order dependence-especially with an aggressive firewall with HIPS like OA. Besides the usual conflicts for prime system resources, these products tend to do things like run in the background at boot before the GUI comes and block things you are interested in invisibly. Making c:/program files/avast software an exception with a a dummy file even though it isn't installed until after OA has helped in some cases. This all seems to be getting more complicated though. Is there some basic conflict between the TDI/NDIS filtering and the Windows Filtering Platform architecture, for example, or some other legacy XP vs Vista/7 approaches.
