Can not play games that use CD

[andyjf]

After installation of v4.1.342 I cannot play any games that need to access a CD in the drive.
I would appreciate any advice on settings to allow these games to play.
thanks  

[igor]

What is your OS?
What does it mean "cannot play" - what happens?
Can you access the CDs in an ordinary way - e.g. reading the files from Explorer?
Does it occur on every CD, or just some (if only some, which ones, for example)?

[andyjf]

My OS is 98se.
"Cannoy play" is best described as: Games are installed on PC and played OK prior to update.  Now when game is started from shortcut, even when the CD is in the drive, games are requesting CD to be placed in drive and contiue to do this. other games do not do this but return to windows, but windows appear to be in 16bit with limited colours.
Music: have tested music CD also. Media player will not recognise format and doesn't play.  It used to???  Explorer sees CD and audio CD

Got any ideas?

[igor]

Media Player will not play Audio CDs? Wov, that's really strange...
When you insert a data CD - can you browse to it in Explorer and open some file from the CD (e.g. a readme.txt in Notepad, or somethink like that)?

Does it help when you disable the avast! resident protection - specifically the Standard Shield provider?

Do you update avast! regularly? I mean, before the updated to the recent build 342 where the problems started (if I understand it correctly) - did you have the previous latest build 335, or did you have a rather old version (e.g. 268 or something like that)? The reason I'm asking is that in my opinion, there were no changes in the relevant resident protection code recently... a long time ago, a change was done to avoid conflicts with various copy-protection techniques (used often in games) - but that was in October 2003...

Last question: didn't you install any "low-level" stuff recently that may cause such problems (and has nothing to do with avast) - e.g. a burning software?

[andyjf]

Thanks for responding, igor.
I have solved the problem by uninstalling avast. Interesting thing was that the graphics setting in the control panel/systems/performance /graphis acceleration had been set to "none". When I checked it last night it was on 'full'.
Last question first: I haven't installed anything since the update.
Avast wa set to update automatically and the problem only occurred after 342 was loaded.
And your first question: the standard sheid disabling didn't help. I tied it on a few settings within 'custom'. no effect in either. I tried turning off all the sheilds in resident protection but no change. Ditto when I disabled resident protection.

Strange thing this one!  

Now that I've uninstalled avast I see it will require a re-downlad to reinstall. Don't know if I'm game
cheers. :'(