Program update with no restart required?

[RejZoR]

Is it possible to make avast! program update painless as much as possible... I have restart option in mind...

If you turn off all processes and stop services,than you can update without restart i guess. This would be very cool feature,since restarting takes time... Or are there other low level components that can be updated only by restarting machine?

Thx for info

[igor]

That's my wish, too.
Unfortunatelly, it's quite a problem I'm afraid. Some parts are hard to unload... drivers, Script Blocker (having DLLs shared through all the processes).... It would certainly be nice, but I'm not very optimistic.

[kubecj]

drivers are AFAIK unloadable - so not 'hard' but impossible to unload.
also every dll which acts as a hook is loaded in every process' address space, also unloadable.

Shell extensions would require Explorer restart.
What about Outlook plugin? Should we simply close Outlook under your hands writing the mail?  

etc.

Reboot method is the only safe one in the Windows world.

[pk]

It's not impossible to unload the driver, but it's not always safe - IO Manager does not keep track of what file operations might be pending inside a given file system stack. It's possible to wait approx. 5sec in unload fn during its unloading and reloading - and it would work in most cases; but stability is more important then your slow restart . In fact, avast 4.5 - as vlk announced today - will have 100%-ly unloadable driver for WinXP (later for Win2k) users; other problems with script blocker, OE plugin, ... remain.

[Vlk]

Reboot issues are only solvable by having fixed stubs that provide the load/unload capability for the real modules.