On-Access Protection will not start following Win98 GPF

[FredBear]

Hi All,

This is my first post so please be gentle!

I'm using aVast on 3 PCs at home, all running Win98se on a wireless network and 2 are going gangbusters.

The 3rd PC is having issues however. It suffered a General Protection Fault while my daughter was "doing something" in Firefox and it was only recoverable by rebooting. When the PC restarted all was fine, EXCEPT for the aVast icon in the systray showing up with a red circle indication that On-Access Protection was not running.

No matter what I try to do, On-Access Protection will not start and hence this PC now has no active virus protection! Fairly dangerous when its user is a 13 year old girl.......

I tried a clean shutdown and reboot, scandisk, uninstalling & reinstalling aVast but to no avail - it simply won't allow me to start up On-Access Protection.

When I bring up the On-Access Protection Control window, all the 'provider' icons are grayed out and by selecting one and clicking on the Start button, I get a cannot start subsystem message. It does the same thing for all 'providers'.

I am not at this PC now but if anyone has suggestions as to a possible cause and solution, lease post here and I look up this thread on the PC in question when I get home and hopefully be able to shed more light on the problem.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!

[ardvark]

Hi FredBear...

Hi and welcome to the forums

You can first try a repair of Avast. Go to the control panel under add/remove programs, click on Avast and you should see that option listed.

If that doesn't work, try performing an online scan here...

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

and downloading and running Blacklight...

http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/try.shtml

Also, are you using a antispyware program such as Adaware or Spybot?

Please post back with your results.

Best Regards...

[FredBear]

Hi ardvark,

Thanks for the reply, but none of those recommendations were of any help.

I may uninstall aVast and try another a/v program to see whether that improves matters - never fear, I WILL return to aVast once this issue is sorted out!

[ardvark]

Hi FredBear...

Ok, if you are running Windows XP and have the OS disk, try running a chkdsk /r scan under "run" in the start menu. A file or two might have got corrupted somehow.

Also...

I'm not sure if you feel technically up to trying this but you can try taking out that particular hard drive and installing it as a slave on one of your other machines and running various scans through that route. It has worked for other folks.

Best Regards...

[FredBear]

As per my original post, it is running Win98se and suffered a GPF. I doubt that this is a virus related issue however all I want is an a/v app that actually runs!

I have the blue ball in the systray with a little red 'stop sign' at the bottom left of the icon and when hovering the mouse on it I get the message "avast! On-Access Scanner: 6 provider(s) total, 0 running".

If I open up the On-Access Protection Control and try to start any of the providers manually, it produces a message titled: "The requested resident task was not found" with the message saying "The operation could not be completed".

According to Task Manager, Ashmaisv.exe and Ashwebv.exe are both running.

This is frustrating the hell out of me - ideas anyone??

[ardvark]

As per my original post, it is running Win98se and suffered a GPF. I doubt that this is a virus related issue however all I want is an a/v app that actually runs!

I have the blue ball in the systray with a little red 'stop sign' at the bottom left of the icon and when hovering the mouse on it I get the message "avast! On-Access Scanner: 6 provider(s) total, 0 running".

If I open up the On-Access Protection Control and try to start any of the providers manually, it produces a message titled: "The requested resident task was not found" with the message saying "The operation could not be completed".

According to Task Manager, Ashmaisv.exe and Ashwebv.exe are both running.

This is frustrating the hell out of me - ideas anyone??

Excuse me, I forgot that from your original post, no need to get abrasive Being "gentle" is a two way street.

You can run the file checker in Windows 98 as well under "accessories"---->"system tools"---->"system information."

Other folks on here might have more insight at this point than I do.

Try another AV, see what happens.