For any of you who have application firewall (Zone Alarm, Online Armor, Comodo, any other), you should start your PC, wait for the boot completion and you should see a popup from the firewall informing you about new program trying to communication on the Internet. (ashWebsv.exe - WebShield). If you did not see that, it is also possible that your firewall has automatically allowed our process, you should than verify that in the application rules or whatever means the firewall has to control its behavior.
In case of problems I recommend the following:
1) log in
2) terminate the WebShield provider
3) verify that the ashwebsv.exe process is terminated in Task Manager (there are times where firewall may block the initial network initialization in webshield and the whole process remains blocked until actually terminated)
4) if ashwebsv.exe is still in Task Manager after a minute or so, terminate it from there (you might need to disable Avast Self Protection to be able to do this)
5) open your firewall application control and remove any references for the ashwebsv.exe process. There should be some - if not, your firewall appparently failed to spot the process started
6) now start the WebShield provider, if you have removed all references in firewall you should either see a popup informing you of automatic detection of good program, or you might see a question whether you want WebShield to be allowed or not. Please answer yes.
If this dialog does not appear, or ashwebsv.exe does not automatically show in the application page in firewall and Web does not work - then again the firewall failed to work properly.
7) if you answered yes, it should work properly now and for several milions of new users on both XP and VISTA each month this process completes perfectly
This is also true after any update of avast program. You should be notified that the program ashwebsv.exe has changed. If not, your firewall might be too benevolent, if the web stops working without any popup - your firewall might have troubles detecting network requests during boot.
The reason why you see this is the fact, that WebShield as a service starts pretty early in the boot process. Usually the user is not yet logged in when the WebShield starts and wants to listen on the localhost interface. Now, if the firewall wants to display the popup message for you it can't since the user is not yet logged in. How the particular firewall handles this situation then differs for every product. Some display the popup later, and all that is needed is a new restart, some don't display that at all, and they silently block WebShield network activity, and some somehow manage to handle that unnoticed. (the WebShield process is signed by Alwil Software and can be easily verified to be unmodified, so handling this automatically is possible for the firewall).
We have seen problems of this kind with Zone Alarm and lately with Online Armor but in general every firewall should notify you about the fact, that the program has changed and suggest some solutions for you.
Lukas.
