Hi,
I've loved Avast for years but lately I'm finding I'm having to turn off features that should be protecting me.
The first thing I had to disable was Email Guardian. With it enabled, I am unable to send or receive email from my hosting company. None of the settings suggest why - but with it enable, I simply cannot connect to the IMAP service using either commercial email clients or my own home grown IMAP applications - they cannot open the TCP socket.
Not ideal, but I have other things for vetting email, so I was ok turning that off.
Over the weekend, I has suddenly found that a plugin I *have* to use for software development (it signs code at the end of the compile) was halting for 150s at the end of each compile. After spending the best part of the day trying to establish where the problem is, I took a punt on disabling Avast One... and now it all works.
I turned off shields in turn until I found which one was to blame - Ransom Protection...
I like the idea of Ransom protection, but this is affecting a local, trusted, process that has been running without change for years, and the project files are not even listed in the Ransom protection folders. Still - Avast One has decided to upset a process that is perfectly legal, and doesn't appear to have any way to determine why it's treating this plugin as a false positive for malware.
Avast is great... but if the product continues to do more to get in the way than protect my machine, I'll probably move to something else - which, yes, may be less secure - but I need to be able to use my machine too.