"View Scan Reports" never completes

[larrymcg]

I'm using avast Home Edition v4.7.1098 on WinXP

After doing a scan, clicking the View Scan Reports facility starts up Notepad but nothing ever appears in the notepad window.  However the PC gets very unresponsive, not due to high cpu use, but to Notepad acquiring more and more memory.  I just watched notepad acquire almost 400MB of memory and my virtual memory (paging file) usage went to 1.2GB.  I had to kill Notepad and eventually things returned to normal.

I can't recall if this feature has every worked as I've been an avast user for only a few months.

Should I be able to view the scan report?

--Larry

[Lisandro]

Hmmm... are you sure that the scan has finished before you open the report on Notepad?
Can you 'uncheck' the option for 'Ok files' into report options and see what you get?

[larrymcg]

"OK Files" was never selected and I just checked to verify that it is still not selected.  And yes the scan had been completed for several minutes.  The status page showed how many objects had been scanned (over 300 thousand) and how many infected files (0).  I've tried looking at the scan log after the last two scans with the same non-results.

I took a look where avast puts the log file and found it.  It's an almost 390MB text file.  I tried opening it with Notepad and got into a bind again.  I tried WORD too.  As WORD was trying to open it I watched via the task monitor.  Very interesting.  WORD's memory usage went way up and the paging file usage went up to about 1.2GB and then all of a sudden WORD's memory usage dropped to very small and so did the paging file usage.  Of course WORD was non-responsive so I had to kill it.  No text ever got displayed. 

Very strange behavior.  At least my system didn't crash!  I have my paging file pre-allocated to 1.5GB and I have only 512MB on my system (WinXP).  Maybe the paging file actually filled up!  It seems to me that WORD should be able to open a 390MB file though.  Hmmmmm.......

I will try deleting the existing avast log file and do another scan to see what I get.

--Larry

[Lisandro]

I will try deleting the existing avast log file and do another scan to see what I get.

Please check the folder <avast>\data\log
Are there any files called unpXXXX there  (where XXXX is a random number)?
If so, send them to vlk (at) avast.com
They may contain more information about the problem (maybe a link to this thread).

[larrymcg]

There were two such files created back in February.  They were named
unp210887676.tmp.mdmp and unp227654877.tmp.mdmp but they BOTH were empty.  So I didn't email them.

So I did an experiment.  I renamed the existing huge scan report file and ran another scan.  It created a txt file with a size of about 39KB.  I was able to view it via the avast command and by opening it directly with Notepad.  I then ran another scan and saw that avast was appending the new data into the existing file.  So, given enough scans, the report file will grow until it is way too large to do anything with.

Checking the options for the scan file, there are two of interest:  "Create a Report File" and "Overwrite Existing".  In my case the Create was checked but Overwrite was not.  So, I checked Overwrite and did another scan.  This worked as expected - the existing report file was deleted and an new one started.

Problem solved, I think.

I looked at a bunch of the report file.  It seems to be full of entries for skipped files.  Lots of them.  Most of the skipping is because of "scanner settings" and a bunch are because of exclusions I have entered.  I'm not sure what the scanner settings are that cause so many files to be skipped but I guess it's OK.

Does all this sound OK to you?

Thanks,
Larry

[Lisandro]

Problem solved, I think.

I think the same.

I'm not sure what the scanner settings are that cause so many files to be skipped but I guess it's OK.

It seems ok. In Vista, symbolic links are skipped. But I don't know why in XP there are so many 'skipped' files... Can you post their path? (at least some of them).

[larrymcg]

I think every file is being skipped.  Here's more evidence than you ever wanted to see:

The Scan Report claims that 401,450 files were scanned in 9744 folders.  I believe there are on the order of 9700 folders but, according to Retrospect, my backup program, there are not anywhere near 401 thousand files in those folders.  More like 100 thousand.

I used WORD to count some things in the report file and found:  “skipped” appears 220,992 times which, to me, means there are that many entries in the report.  The word “exclusion” appears 358 times meaning that 358 of those 220 thousand entries were due to my explicit exclusions.  I can believe several hundred files due to exclusion.

Here's an ordinary .DOC file which generates 5 entries in the skipped list:
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Larry's Documents\Books to Read.doc\_1_CompObj [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Larry's Documents\Books to Read.doc\1Table [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Larry's Documents\Books to Read.doc\_5_SummaryInformation [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Larry's Documents\Books to Read.doc\WordDocument [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Larry's Documents\Books to Read.doc\_5_DocumentSummaryInformation [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)

-------------- ----------- ----------- ---------------

The following is from a folder containing only 2 JPG files and a thumbs.db (hidden) file.  Both JPG files were skipped and there are 7 entries for the thumbs.db file:
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Gas line inspection closeup.jpg [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Gas line inspection.jpg [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\2 [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\1 [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\4 [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\3 [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\6 [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\5 [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Pictures\General Photos\Misc document pics\Thumbs.db\Catalog [E] File was skipped because of scanner settings. (42016)

----------- -------- ------------
Some file types, like MP3 files, although skipped only generate 1 entry in the report.

I haven't found a file that was not skipped.

This looks real bad to me.  I'm doing a Standard Scan Level.

--Larry

[igor]

This is as expected, no problem here.
avast! checks the format of each file, and if it's not found infectable (such as executables, documents or something like that), it's skipped - i.e. not scanned (= "skipped"). If you ran a "thorough" scan, all files would be scanned (which is probably an unnecessary overkill).

[larrymcg]

Is there a list of "skippable" files?  I certainly would not have executables on that list!

Why are there multiple entries for a single file?  Some files have 5 or more entries!

--Larry

[larrymcg]

I did a search for "skipped" and found a post by Igor that explains why some files have multiple "skipped" entries.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=30796.msg255117#msg255117

Since my scan report does not include the "OKs", it includes only the skipped parts of each file.  I'll try to do some more experiments to verify what I think I understand.  Huh?  I think I understand something?   

--Larry

[Lisandro]

Is there a list of "skippable" files?  I certainly would not have executables on that list!

For sure executables are scanned... unless you deliberately set avast to do it not.