Avast Trashed Magic Folders

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Sometimes you wonder which is worse, viruses or the AV designed to protect.  I did a scan with Avast and among the things it didn't like is a program called Magic Folders which I've used for years and has escaped any scans before now so I don't know what happened.  Frankly, if I could RESTORE to a date prior to this scan on my Win764 machine, I would because I'm not confident in what Avast was reporting in that scan overall, but my Restore option doesn't work on this, for whatever reason.  Can anyone tell me how to get my Magic Folders working again?  Noted conversation about it on this link by Vik, Drmsucks and Lisandro but there was no reference as to what they did.  Thanks for any help.

https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=35219.10;imode

[DavidR]

Well you are referring to a topic from 2008 a lot will have happened in seven and a half years for both programs. Avast was 4.8 and that bug was resolved in that version, we are now on avast 11.1.2241. I have no idea what version magic folders was then and now.

You would be best to continue in this topic and explain what happened.

Why can't you restore to an earlier point ?
Disable the avast self defence module before using system restore.

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It had been a while since I ran a scan though Avast is always active in my system tray with shields running.  The Magic Folders was an older version but I'm not sure how or why that might matter.  It worked fine and I don't know that it's even supported for upgrades though reportedly, there were issues before of false positives that others had tried to work out before now.  I tried to restore to two earlier restore points that failed with a reference to my AV.  I even tried restoring from safe-mode and after having shut off Avast, with no luck.

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and the biggest deal is that the folders that were hidden by Magic Folders don't show up but I can't access Magic Folders to 'unhide' them.

[DavidR]

Presumably you got some sort of avast alert, possibly from the DeepScreen. The next presumption (depending on avast version and settings) is that it was sent to the virus chest ?

You will have to deal with the detection first, if it was sent to the virus chest you can open the virus chest and Restore the file and also exclude it.

If this is an old copy of Magic Folders which I suspect it is, it is probably unsigned (I had the same issue on old copies of MS Excel and Word), adding them to the exclusions was enough. I also have an old password finder that is considered a PUP, that too had to be added to the exclusions. Obviously you have to be sure it isn't infected, likely given it is an old file.

What version of avast are you running (latest is 11.1.2241) ?

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Thanks David - appreciate your replies very much.   

[DavidR]

You're welcome.