I'm running free 12.3.2280 on Win8.1Pro. After working with no recent issues I found that my Skype connections would randomly get disabled and Firefox would no longer retrieve any pages. Dropbox also failed to connect, and other apps were failing.
I did a reboot and stilll had no connections.
I disabled the Avast web shield and it all came back.
Re-enabled and ... well, I tried to reenable but it hung for several minutes and didn't even open the app UI.
When the UI came back connectivity didn't drop - yet anyway.
[EDIT] I couldn't post this note with web shield running. Dropped web shield and retried post to get a successful page update here.
[EDIT2] Same pattern,when web shield is disabled, Avast UI doesn't come up for a Long time, app goes unresponsive. This is repeatable here.
[EDIT3] (Final) I notice that if I disable Web Shield for 10 minutes, that browser activity is indeed completely blocked as soon as it comes back on. I'm turning it off until a new update is posted. I added a final note to the other thread I started back in May (link below) where I reported the exact same issue which was "magically" fixed on the next update. This is only related to browser (Firefox?) DNS resolution, not ALL DNS. I can telnet to a hostname. I just can't browse to one. And Since Dropbox is also failing I'm guessing they're making HTTP/webservice calls internally for status.
What's weird is that Avast usually does something to kill my DNS access, so Skype remains alive while everything else that requires a DNS resolution is dead. Skype connects with a hard-coded IP address, not hostname/DNS. So this is not
that problem. [EDIT4] At least not exactly, unless Skype is hanging because it can't retrieve its ads.
I'll continue to reboot and do tests as possible but of course I need to get work done too...
This is just an FYI that "something" is up.
Thanks for 99.385% awesome software.
