I don't know if we've talked about it in this long post, but haven't you ever had another antivirus installed on this computer?
In that case, it may not have been uninstalled thoroughly and may cause a problem with avast
The problem computers being discussed are fairly recent installations and have only had Avast Free AV on them. In fact, the Win8.1 desktop which displays the perpetual yellow ! attention-getter along with the
Your Avast Subscription Has Expired notification on the
Status page of the Avast UI has
never had a license. I initially installed the last 2019 version available and then updated to the new 2020 version, neither of which has been able to install a license. The Win7 Pro computer at least had a license at one point, which expired and then was never able to get a renewal license.
I have done a number of clean installs including uninstalling from
Add/Remove Programs, rebooting and then uninstalling with avastclear in safe mode before reinstalling.
There has to be something that we aren't aware of that's causing this.
We don't have access to the users computer and without remote access, we may never find out the underlying cause.
Agreed. I've used the word
voodoo several times in this context. Barring some type of divine revelation I don't expect to ever find out what the exact problem is in my case.
Jiri settled on the general notion that something in the network path which allows my computer to access the internet was not playing nicely with the Avast servers responsible for allowing the generation of free licenses from scratch, rather than than there being an issue with the severs themselves or my computer's internal environment. I was able to get an active license from Avast, on this same network, when I entered an activation code for Avast Premium which he said used a different set of Avast servers. I also managed to get a license for Avast Free AV on a notebook computer when using a different network (library wifi connection) instead of my home internet access. So, it seems to me that he is right about there being some issue between my home internet access and a particular group of Avast servers. What that exact problem is and how to address it will likely remain a mystery, since finding out would require unfettered access to my computer by an Avast engineer -- which ain't likely to happen. Advanced troubleshooting like that would only be warranted if the issue under investigation was far more widespread than one guy's problem on one network.
Grant