Hello to all.
I would like to report an occurence of ashserv.exe having spikes of high usage when using the Mozilla email client.
On a clean WinXP system (AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 1GB RAM) with Mozilla Thunderbird or Seamonkey Project e-mail client, with junk mail filters turned on or off, every Avast scanning operation runs fine, doesn't hog the system abnormally. But after an Avast upgrade some months ago, I noticed that junk mail filtering and normal opening of email messages got considerably slower, invoking a 1-3 second pause before loading the body of the message (even text with no images). Deleting and sorting messages also got less responsive. The task manager showed ashserv.exe having short spikes of 90-100% CPU usage when opening a message in the e-mail client.
After reading this thread, I turned the sensitivity of the standard shield from High to Normal and now, things seem to run fine - emails load almost immediately. I'll post an update if this proves wrong. What interests me is, what have I "lost" in scanning effectiveness with this change of settings and if there is another way of doing it better.
Thanks!