avast home 4.8 scan problem

[anupupadhye]

im anup. i m using avast home 4.8. my probelm is when i start manual scan, the scan commences. but when it reaches to 5% the whole pc gets stuck, nothing  works. not even the mouse moves, end task, alt+f4 or esc does not work. i ve to turn off pc directly...

i had downloaded avast 6 mths ago and all features including manual scan were working fine. but its now that the problem has arised. Pls help....

thanks
anup

[Tarq57]

Hi, anup.
What OS is it? RAM, CPU?
What other security programs are installed?
What other AV was installed before Avast?
Has there been any other unusual behaviour of the computer?

[anupupadhye]

hi... my os is xp professional, with 512mb of ram.. i had avg installed before but completely uninstaled it b4 instaling avast... currently i hav only avast in my pc.. the pc works ok xcept dis problem...

[Tarq57]

Well, the computer should have adequate performance.
Does it always stop at the same file? And if so, the full path and name of the file might assist those who know more about these things than me.
What scan settings are you using? Normally, for a first scan, I'd use "standard scan'' and not enable scanning archives.
It would be a good idea to run a disk cleanup before scanning, to reduce the number of unnecessary files scanned. (I find Ccleaner good for that job.)
Also try running the AVG remover, http://www.avg.com/download-tools which will remove any AVG leftovers, that might be interfering. (Do this first.)

[Lisandro]

You can go to the program settings and turn on the creation of the report file (with "OK files" to be included as well in the report). This way, you can find out where the scan really stopped (it's going to be close to the end of the report).

After avast! disappears, check the end of the report file - the "troublesome" file is likely to be close to the end (close in the sense that this particular file will probably not be written in the report, but the previous one will be the last line, so it shouldn't be hard to guess). We would certainly like to have this file - if it really causes problems to avast! - so that we could fix the problem.

The report file created (if you turned it on in program settings) will be (default location) at <avast4>\Data\Report\Simple User Interface.txt

[anupupadhye]

it stops near a file or may be folder named $ntservicepackuninstall$.dll in windows folder.. it stops near the same file /folder every time. the thing s that this folder has 350 mb of memory.... so i cant even del it . it meight contain a lot of important files...
thanx

[sded]

Try this:
Right click the avast! icon and go to program settings/exclusions.  Then browse for this file an exclude it from scanning.  A giant file like this could be taking a considerable time to unpack and scan, and since you know what it is, it should be safe to exclude it from the scan.  Don't know why the scan is taking over the machine, but see if this works for you.

[DavidR]

If you see the page/file displayed I think that was the last scanned and it is actually working on the next file, so I don't know if exclusion on that particular;ar file would have any impact.

Though as sded mentions that particular file could be huge, depending on which service pack it was. If you have had the service pack installed for some considerable time you could remove it, that would mean that you couldn't uninstall the service pack and roll back to the previous version. Though removal isn't a s simple as just deleting the file.