newbie question: 'unknown error'

[crytwalker]

I thought I had 4.x installed OK, but it won't do a scan for me.  I get  "The scan completed with error: 4200 =  unknown error."

Is an uninstall-install the thing to do here? (I tried a simple 'change' reinstall, and nothing new happened.)

Thanks for any ideas on this.

CC

[DavidR]

What version do you have exactly, 4.7.892 is the latest release, check about avast for details.

What were you scanning when this happened ?
Unknown error is by its very nature 'unknown' going to be difficult to identify, a forum search for the error number will no doubt return many hits, but I don't believe it will help much unless one of them exactly matches your circumstances and it has a solution.

Can you replicate the error ?
If not I would tend to ignore it unless it becomes an issue then perhaps the add remove programs, change/remove, Repair first.

[oldman]

It would also be good to know which operaring system yoou use, if you had a previous av installed and how you uninstalled it.

Like DavidR said, a search will give you some hits on the error. I found one in which the problem was virus related. If you are using nt or xp try a boot time scan.

To do a repair you must be on line.

[crytwalker]

Thanks DavidR and oldman, for your replies.

I went ahead and did an uninstall-install (of 4.7.892).  I asked for and it did a successful boot time scan of my HD. However, when I open avast it does a memory scan and reports the 'scan completed with error' message just like before, and there is no record of the boot time scan.

This is a new computer (Win XP Home SP 2). I uninstalled the AV that came with the unit (system uninstall), and disabled Win firewall in favor of ZoneAlarm.

Avast appears to be running just fine other than the scan problem.

[DavidR]

What was the other AV ?
Some are very difficult to remove fully although I wouldn't have thought it would get in the way on a pre windows scan.

The only record of a boot time scan I believe would be if it found something and there was a new entry in the avast chest. Other than that, since it is outside of windows I don't think it creates any log entries.

[crytwalker]

The Dell-supplied AV was Trend Micro's PC-cillin. 

There may be a complication in that I used PC Mover to bring the old computer's stuff into the new machine. That meant that I had avast (which I used on the old maschine) in the backgound until I uninstalled it.  For a while I thought I would use PC-cillin, but I changed my mind, uninstalled it (system uninstall) and reinstalled avast.   Then I did the just-mentioned uninstall-install of avast  and that's where I am now.

(BTW it's probably not an important point, but my OS is  Win XP Media Center, not Home. )

[DavidR]

I don't know if there is a manual removal tool for pc-cillin, but it would be worth a look.

Dell can have some weird stuff going on at the best of times with some protection to stop you removing their installed programs, I don't know if that is an issue here or not.

Download the avast! Uninstall Utility, find it here and save it to your HDD so you can find it later.

Then uninstall, reboot, run the uninstall utility, reboot install, reboot. That hopefully should give you a clean start with no possible remnants of your old install, registry, etc.

[crytwalker]

Thanks a lot for the advice.  I'll give it a try.

[crytwalker]

Well, I did the suggested series of uninstalls/reboots, and it looks like the problem is somewhere else.

Maybe I should reinstall PC-cillin, then uninstall it? Would that make any sense?

I want to keep avast, and it does seem to be doing the real-time protection thing, but  scans would be good to have, and it's looking like advast is not really scanning now.  The error message does say the 'scan completed with error' but I think it really means 'scan terminated because of error' instead.

[DavidR]

I'm not sure installing and uninstalling pc-cillin would help 'if' a previous uninstall left anything behind then that may happen again. If there were any remnant it is possibly registry keys, legacy or virtual device drivers. A search if the registry for either trend or pc-cillin may be more use or a registry cleaner to look for redundant entries.

The error message does say the 'scan completed with error' but I think it really means 'scan terminated because of error' instead.

I think that in this case that would be correct.

I'm at a loss here as I have never come across this problem before where a scan of the memory cause this unknown error, I'm assuming it is memory based on your previous comments.

I don't know of any program that can check what is loaded in memory (Task Manager would go some way and also checking if there are any services running). It may have nothing to do with pc-cillin as we don't often have any topics relating to remnants after an uninstall and avast usually reports these possible conflicts.