Author Topic: Avast is causing system crash.  (Read 1657 times)

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Daemon Ryuou

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Avast is causing system crash.
« on: January 31, 2014, 10:13:17 AM »
Hello, I'm Daemon. I've been programming for over 10 years and have been a loyal user who swears by Avast to everyone, but have recently been running into some issues.


--- Background ---

About a week or so ago, I was infected with malware that was grinding my system to a halt and ended up having to wipe my computer. As I always do, the very first things I do after booting for the first time are install my drivers using the disk I ordered from the manufacturer, installing Avast, and creating a "clean slate" system restore point (in that order).

After doing so, I installed MinGW64, MSYS, and Netbeans to begin working on a project. It built properly without any warnings, but when I tried to run the application, my system froze for about 2 minutes and I was greeted with the blue screen of death. I figured perhaps it was a bug in the toolchain, and just in case I inadvertently caused damage to my pc, I used my clean restore point and installed MinGW/MSYS 32-bit as I have always used it and trust the source. Instead of Netbeans, I was now using Notepad and building my applications manually from the terminal.

When I ran the applications I built, I was confused because they were ran twice. The first time was within a sandbox environment which I assumed is a new feature avast recently added, and the second was the default execution. A little aggravating, but bigger issue was that 1 out of 5 times, the application would freeze before it even started and I would have to kill both processes from the task manager. The issue became even more problematic when I tried to write a small assembly stub for the entry point of one of my projects. Then it escalated to the point were it would crash half the time.

I also started having other problems like windows explorer stalling for 2-5 minutes at a time, being unable to open the task manager or use system shortcuts like Ctrl+Alt+Del, and entire system freezes that required hard rebooting which most commonly occurred when watching videos on websites, but was not limited to it.


I realized that if I disabled avast, that pretty much all these issues disappeared. If someone could patch these bugs asap, it would be much appreciated.  :)   I'd rather not have to switch to a different virus protection software if possible.



--- The Issues ---

- Applications are opened  twice
- Applications crash randomly
- Entire system freezes often, especially when watching videos on website
- Blue-screen of death (sometimes)


--- Specs ---

Platform:  Dell N5050 Inspiron,  Intel Duo Pentium x64 @ 2.3GHz, 500GB HD, 4GB ram, Intel 2000 "Sandy Bridge" GPU
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1 (clean installation, system and drivers up to date)

Avast Version: 2014.9.0.2013
Virus Definitions Version: 140130-1
« Last Edit: January 31, 2014, 10:18:37 AM by Daemon Ryuou »

Daemon Ryuou

  • Guest
Re: Avast is causing system crash.
« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2014, 11:33:48 AM »
Another problem I just discovered, avast is causing enormous memory leaks in other applications.


With Avast installed, the DWM hovers at about 40,000K and the Maxthon browser slowly grows up from 380,000K

With Avast uninstalled, the DWM hovers at about 25,000K and the Maxthon browser hovers at 45,000K



I can honestly say I'm not happy about this at all. This is too much of an issue to ignore or wait to be fixed, so I'll be moving on to Bitdefender.