Avast killed my Mac!

[winkingskunk]

Ok.  So I don't know what is up, but we download the free trial version of your Avast for Macs and ran it.  Everything seemed fine at first, however the next morning we noticed that everything on the desktop was gone and we could not use Finder.  After rebooting, Avast automatically came up (along with Mail), but once again, no Desktop and no Finder.  We have tried everything to fix this problem, but are now in the process of wiping the computer and re-installing software.  You may be thinking, "Why didn't they just uninstall?".  Because we couldn't.  We couldn't open Finder, and even after finding the Avast program we were not allowed to throw anything away or open Trash.  I have no clue what happened, but I just wanted to warn everyone.

Have a happy day!

[.: Mac :.]

I really dont think Avast was the cause of this. Zilog explained in another post how Avast only has one module that really is at the system level and it would just cause a kernel Panic

[winkingskunk]

I don't know.  There was never a problem with the Mac until we installed Avast onto it.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what your reply meant.  It was like a doctor speaking medical jargon to me.  Sorry.

[zilog]

I don't know.  There was never a problem with the Mac until we installed Avast onto it.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what your reply meant.  It was like a doctor speaking medical jargon to me.  Sorry.

Hallo,
as was stated elsewhere, avast NEVER modifies files without user's knowledge and explicit permission. So, this might be somecoincidence with another flaw that occured after avast!'s installation. Please, have on mind, that avast is in nearly all aspect a well behaved userspace application, and won't do such nasty things...

Regards,
PC

[smkolins]

Ok.  So I don't know what is up, but we download the free trial version of your Avast for Macs and ran it.  Everything seemed fine at first, however the next morning we noticed that everything on the desktop was gone and we could not use Finder.  After rebooting, Avast automatically came up (along with Mail), but once again, no Desktop and no Finder. 

If you are running 10.4 or higher I'd highly suggest booting with the shift key down all the way through the boot. It will take longer but it does a variety  of basic maintenance routines on the Mac - look around on the internet for "Safe Boot". When it's done booting you should be seeing your login window whether you've set to auto-login or not. In red it will say "Safe Boot". You can let go of the shift key. You can now restart or try login - if you continue to hold the shift key down it will not launch things that auto-launch on login.

Another approach to this is to check if the problem is just with the one login or affects all logins - make another login if you can and test. If it works then whatever is wrong is only in the home folder of the affected login. Probably a pref file or a .DS-Store corruption.