Alright so I've been running Avast! since the Windows XP era, but recently I've noticed some strange behaviour with certain processes not terminating after a program was fully closed.
Today I noticed an odd problem with Powershell, when launched from any place in explorer, it would just hang, it does not show up with the current directory path at all.
It would shortly work after a fresh start-up of Windows, but it would hang shortly after. Even in a VMWare Workstation virtual machine with Avast! installed this issue would occur.
In both cases Windows 10 22H2 x64 Professional is used which is fully up-to-date.
So I just tried to dug into it deeper, and closed all running programs except the Anti-Virus, guess what? The problem persists.
So I disabled Avast! entirely, the problem disappeared.
There is an issue within Avast! that is causing this.
So I looked further, disabling shield by shield and toggling some options including self protection etc, and then I found the culprit
The Anti-rootkitshield under Important Shields > Malware in settings is causing conflicts with programs processes not properly closing.
I am running the most recent version of Avast! Anti-virus Premium Security (24.7)
My system should be in my signature below.
Programs that I know have trouble closing their processes and require manual termination with anti-rootkit shield turned on:
- Discord
- Curseforge
- Powershell
I know Powershell worked perfectly fine with Avast! not a very long time ago, but I also know this does not affect every system with Avast! installed, for example I have not noticed an issue with a free version on a different system HOWEVER that is an Intel core i5-12500 processor dat does not employ any E-cores.
I sometimes also have trouble starting up programs but I have a feeling that it might be related to either the E-cores and/or the amount of threads that the 13900K has which maybe not all applications handle very well.
This would often result into:
- Programs hanging on start (often multiple times with jdownloader or discord)
- Programs processes are running but not visible (e.g. steam) requiring a manual termination and then it works after a manual start.
This is not something I see happening on Intel i5-12500, but I have seen happening on Intel 13900K from the start in 2022, even as far as the 'Save as' window freezing and crashing applications with it such as paint.net when the hard-drive list is expanded in explorer, but not when the list is collapsed.
This happens both on NVMe as SATA-600 SSDs as a start-up drive.
What else has been strange on the previous installation is that Microsoft Edge would hang for a long period of time after Windows start-up to be responsive or loading pages after the Avast! Firewall has been set to Ask instead of smart detection, and even after changing it from Ask to another setting Edge would stay broken on the OS installation.
But anyway, the fact that the anti-rootkitshield in Avast! is making Powershell (and other things) hang is weird and might be looked into further, preferably on a system that does emply Intel 12/13/14th gen with E-cores because something is fishy here.
