Hello,
(Sorry if this has been posted before - I did a search and could not find anything relevant.)
My wife's laptop is running avast 8.0.1483 on Win XP professional, and we are very happy with the protection it provides.
However, we seem to have found a problem with avast's behaviour in one particular case:
When the laptop spends several days without receiving a VPS update -for example when she is out of our wifi link for a long period- she can no longer view films or listen to music.
We've tried with Media Player Classic and with Windows player, both do the same thing: when a file is selected, the 'opening' screen stays displayed and the player crashes. Killing the player process in the task manager doesn't help, it always requires a battery pull or a hard restart.
Opening music in Winamp always leads to playing the last title that was opened before the VPS 'expired', but never the new one she wants to listen to.
Here's the trick. If I update via our internet connection or if I do a manual update using vpsupd.exe, the problem vanishes for 48 hours.
--> Now, is there any particular reason for Avast to block file operations when the VPS is outdated? It's quite a handicap when you don't have regular access to the internet (travelling, or when in hospital for long periods, for example) ?
Since she does not use any kind of exchangeable media in these cases, I tried to turn off the avast service completely as a workaround. Even logged in as administrator, I'm not allowed to do it.
I'd very much appreciate alternate solutions to this, since I can't necessarily give her a VPS update every other day and this means her laptop is useless to her most of the time at the moment.
Many thanks!
PS Home computer has exactly the same version of XP and avast and this never happens, because it's always online.
Herm.