I installed Avast on my computers a couple of weeks ago, including in my virtual XP running on my Win7 machine. I'd been having a lot of crashes while doing simple things, such as navigating in Explorer on a networked drive. There were some actions that would reliably cause the virtual XP box to restart.
In another forum (
http://www.sevenforums.com/ ) some helpful person had me upload a zip file of the dumps. He looked at them and said that there was a consistent error message, namely:
b5cfcaf8 b980f316Unable to load image aswSnx.SYS, Win32 error 0n2
*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for aswSnx.SYS
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for aswSnx.SYS
aswSnx+0x5c316The recommendation was to get rid of Avast in favor of MSE, but I did not want to do that. Instead, I did further experiments and found what I think might be related to the problem.
I had done a custom install, putting Avast into its own folder in a special folder I had created for installed programs. I have a habit of not allowing programs to be installed in the usual C:\program files -- reserving C: for strictly MS stuff as much as I can.
What I did was to uninstall Avast and then reinstall with the default install. After I did that, the crashes went away -- I've been two days good now, and the things that would reliably cause a crash no longer do so.
It would seem that the Avast programs cannot properly use aswsnx.sys when it is not in the default folder. IMO, that is a bug.
