Avast SOA + EPSP installed on numerous sites. Since 7.0.1455 (possibly also 1438) we have seen almost all our client base affected by slowness in dozens of different applications across a wide array of client OS (XP SP3 to W7x64).
Also loss of connectivity suddenly because someone switches over to Wifi and avast 'auto-decides' the new NIC is not safe- even though in the same subnet! (therefore should already be a friend).
I have sales of avast pending on sorting out these problems in avast, particularly the stability and slowness and after a lot of testing we think we have finally pinned it down to one thing- the avast Firewall shield!
Customers mainly complain that keyboard is slow to respond, slow to open files, slow to scan documents, slow to print. In almost every case, disabling the avast Firewall shield has brought their applications back to expected speeds!
And before anyone asks, yes we have tried opening required ports, but still the slowness persists!
Given that this is affecting so many of our clients across all of our installs, we are taking the decision to disable the EPSP firewall component completely until avast team has 'tweaked' the firewall component and until we have some confidence in this component's stability and ease of use in a typical corporate environment.
So we can stop monitoring the firewall component in SOA, and untick the Firewall component from the deployment package, but what else is needed in the SOA to disable the firewall shield/components completely?