New user with a problem and some observations:
In attempting to use the Select Folder Scan, I have run into a problem: attempting to repeat a scan on a specific target will eventually fail.
Symptom: start scan, timer starts, no progress is made. The home screen shows Unsecured.
Reason: The avast service stops running immediately after starting the scan. By default windows will only restart the service twice.
Manually starting the service will allow the scan to "finish". Whether or not it is successful I cannot say as it usually reports 0/0 files checked. This may be Avast skipping things it has already scanned, or it may be related to the service problems, but either way it's undesired as if I want to scan a folder multiple times, it should comply. I ran into this testing some things relating to files previously identified as threats not showing up on subsequent scans, so I can't tell if it's a problem with cached results or a failure to properly start a scan on specific locations. Chicken/egg.
Additional fiddling: the service is installed with the default recovery options: first and second failure: restart the service. Subsequent failures: do nothing. Disabling self-protect and changing the recovery options produces the expected results: whatever is specified in the recovery options is what happens, indicating that the service is indeed failing instead of intentionally stopping. Further debugging of service failures is beyond me at this time.
Is the service supposed to be stopping/restarting during normal operations? I would think not. Should folder scans perform a full and thorough scan each time it is requested on the same locations (I've turned off the cache options in the folder scan settings)? That's desired, but I have no previous experience with Avast and it could be normal behavior to skip recently checked files. That wouldn't make sense to me considering there are multiple options relating to scan strength, but that's neither here nor there. The service halting is problematic.
Windows 7, I've never had a previous version installed, everything's up to date, I have reinstalled. Things like Quick Scan run repeatedly without issues.
Found in crash.log: Unhandled exception: Address=6f7b2a3c Code=c0000005
Verified to be triggered by the problem.
