Starting yesterday, a day or so after an Avast program update, when I try to start my old Acrobat.exe or PhotoShop.exe, my computer crashes, and I get a blue screen of death (BSOD). This continues to happen despite reboots, and also after a "Repair" of Avast in Add/Remove Programs, and then a "Modification" of Avast to turn off a lot of its unneeded features.
The screen message in each BSOD is that the cause is aswsnx.sys, an Avast file. I also saw a special reference to that file in my mini-dumps (which are otherwise incomprehensible).
Acrobat and Photoshop open just fine (a) in Safe Mode and (b) in Normal Mode if I first Disable Avast for 10 minutes.
My PC is a good-condition Dell Optiplex 755 Desktop with Win XP SP3 32-bit, which I keep updated using the POS hack, and 4GB RAM. (Using it now.) My Acrobat and Photoshop Elements are from approx. 2001 - old but good programs that have been very useful for a very long time, including with my HP 8500 printer-scanner which is only a few years old. My Acrobat and Photoshop Elements have been running without problems for years with Avast. Yes, this model Optiplex and CPU have hardware virtualization, and Avast has been running with its own hardware virtualization on for a long time now.
The new Avast aswsnx.sys file is version 11.2.2738.0, last modified May 01, 2016, with a digital signature date of April 25, 2016. So it's quite a new version of that file.
Avast - please fix this bad new aswsnx.sys, and let me know how to get a better version of aswsnx.sys. Thanks.
PS - I am now attaching a photo of the BSOD screen - see attached jpg.