Have given up. Literally couldn't download any emails from my primary mailbox without disabling the mail shield, so did a full uninstall and cleanup.
Reinstalled last night and at least things are currently working. Not sure how long for though.
Gary
The clean install worked without error until now (so a bit under 48 hours).
I can confirm that, during this period, I've received emails from the mailbox which has proven to be most troublesome.
I looked through the mail.log and nearly all the messages read "--pop mail is clean", "--SMTP mail is clean", etc, until we get to this evening and I get this error continuously:
"CreateFile(pszHead) error C:\Windows\TEMP\_avast_ 32"
This error occurs every time outlook does a send/receive.
Whether this is somehow the cause or merely a symptom of the problem, I don't know.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Gary
Just an update. Haven't had any problems with currently flagged issue for ages now (he says this very quietly, under his breath)
I've had about 3 or 4 more blocks of the "CreateFile(pszHead) error C:\Windows\TEMP\_avast_ 32" error message documented in the mail.log... but haven't actually witnessed any problems with not being able to download emails.
Seems that the full uninstall and reinstall may have fixed the issue.
Please note that I tried running the avast uninstall utility too, after the uninstall, initially in safe mode (where it did nothing i.e. it ran but nothing additional happened - I was kinda expecting to see some messages about registry key deletion, etc... as most software seems to leave remnants behind)... then ran it in normal desktop mode too (despite the warning that using in safemode is better).
Not saying that this is significant in the apparent resolution of my problem but just documenting what I did.
I'm currently on 32bit vista home premium, with avast 2014.9.0.2011 and virus defs 140116-0
Cheers,
Gary
Well I managed to jinx things well and truly with my last post!!!!!!
I had a re-occurence of my problem.
HOWEVER, I'm almost 100% I've worked out what the problem is and I have a workround to potentially fix the issue.
Ok... the mail.log file reports this kind of error, when I can't download waiting message from my POP3 mailbox:
"CreateFile(pszHead) error C:\Windows\TEMP\_avast_ 32"
I've realised that when I use Ccleaner to housekeep on my PC, it deletes the "_avast_" folder from the windows\temp folder.
I can force the recreation of the "_avast_" folder by getting Avast to do an update.
I'm not sure what other actions may create this folder too... but this seems to work for me. I guess another test would be to simply create a windows folder with the appropriate name in the appropriate temp folder.
Anyway, assuming I've found the problem, I hope this helps someone.
I've going to add the "_avast_" folder to the excluded list in Ccleaner and I'll see whether I get any more incidences of the ""CreateFile(pszHead) error C:\Windows\TEMP\_avast_ 32" error.
Regards,
Gary