Well, what a day have I had!
Got a phone call today that my Mother's Laptop was having trouble. All the programs on it were randomly crashing with out of memory errors. Started sometime last week, but she thought it would go away. I went out there to diagnose the problem - I figured, maybe a virus got by Avast - but it turns out Avast is the problem!
Avast (ashServ.exe) is eating up about 80% of the available memory and pagefile. Can't even get a browser to open on that computer. I tried terminating it in task manager, and procexp, but it simply replied "Access Denied". Tried shutting it off, but apparently the GUI is disconnected from ashServ.exe. One ashServ.exe is using about 72KB of RAM and starts/stops just fine. The other is stranging everything and doesn't want to die. Tried disabling protection, and it allows the tiny one to be terminated. Great. Thanks a ton, genius coders.
None of the dumping stuff works because the protection won't go down. No way to start or stop the process. Can't even uninstall since the process can't be killed.
So, what's left? Reboot? Well that's not an option. Months back Acer's power management software started conspiring with a poorly written Microsoft hotfix to corrupt the registry almost every time a reboot happens. (but not Hibernation) So if I reboot to uninstall avast, I'm going to have to restore the registry so that it thinks Avast is still installed. I wonder how many errors that will introduce?
I guess I'm fraked. Time for an OS reinstall. Next time you coders put out memory leaking shit, think of the repercussions. If you aren't smart enough for a language like C, then use something like C#. Haha... AV in C#... really makes me laugh. But seriously, some quality control, please.
But my day isn't over yet. I get to reinstall the OS now. Maybe I'll just go with Ubuntu and avoid all future Windows™ problems.
-BikeHelmet