Hello There,
I have this problem, which has been nagging me for a while now (at least a year of upgrades, so it isn't something recently added). Currently I'm running Avast 4.8 Home Edition, build Jul2008 (4.8.1229), with VPS 081109-0. It's running on an HP laptop, with WinXP SP3. I am using the old and trusty Sygate Personal Firewall 5.6 (but disabling it doesn't change the situation).
After a random time that I'm running the computer, suddenly tabs in firefox will stop working (as will IE), and the only apparent culprit is ashwebsv.exe using 50% (dual core CPU) of my cpu.
It isn't possible to terminate it from the On Access Center, and trying to kill the process from the windows Task Manager results in an "access is denied" message. Stopping the mail service from services.msc results in it telling me there was a problem, and after trying that the service is stuck in the "stopping" state. (but still uses same amount of cpu).
I've checked other threads about it, but couldn't find anything exactly the same... There are no dump files in the avast log directory and no special messages in the logs that I can see.
Using Process Explorer, I've looked at the process while it is stuck, before and after trying to kill it, and it stays the same. The most interesting thing to look at is the thread section, where it shows about 20 "!endthread+0x.3e" threads (which aren't using cpu), and 1 thread called "!CryptVerifySignatureW+0x17" using all the cpu of the process..
Could somebody help me understand what's going on and finding a fix for it? Also - I saw a mention somewhere of maybe running the ashwebsv under another using than SYSTEM, so killing it will be an option instead of rebooting the computer... Any help with that?
Thanks a bunch!