avast and Windows 7 System Restore

[Lisandro]

Tech,
Have you tried the following:
http://www.askvg.com/fix-windows-7-deletes-all-system-restore-points-upon-reboot/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AskVG+%28AskVG%29

I never need that. It's for a high fragmented pagefile.sys. Not my case.

[Lisandro]

Tech, I always had the system restore problem while running avast.

Thanks for sharing. At least it would not be my voice only...

It's a shame.

+1

[Lisandro]

AGAIN... AVAST INSTALLATION GOT TOTALLY CORRUPT AFTER A CORRECT SYSTEM RESTORE.
NOW, OR SYSTEM RESTORE WORKS AND I NEED TO UNINSTALL AVAST AND INSTALL AGAIN, LOSING ALL MY SETTINGS, OR I CAN'T USE SYSTEM RESTORE.
TOO MUCH NEW APPLICATIONS AND FEATURES AND THE OLD AND GOOD ANTIVIRUS PROBLEMS AREN'T BEING SOLVED.

YEAH. DOUBLE POSTING 
I HATE THIS LOSE OF TIME... WORSE: IT START BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO TEST AVAST FOR ANDROID 

[DonZ63]

Tech, I have been able to suscessfully restore WIN 7 x64 SP1 multiple times with Avast 6 installed.

What I have found out is one or more reboots are required before you see the message on your desktop that WIN 7 has been sucessfully retored. Usually the reboot after system restore is a wipeout. Either the desktop will lockup or the dreaded black screen appears. A hard shutdown via the power switch and reboot usually works but not always. Sometimes one or two more hard shutdowns and reboots are required.

Afterwards I did not observe any Avast anomalies or coruption.

Obviously, Avast is impacting the system restore so this does need to be fixed. I also believe that delaying Avast's startup till the latest possible moment or disabling startup entirely would also help when doing a system restore.

[Lisandro]

Thanks.
I'll try this if avast messed everything again.
Anyway, I've tried boot twice and it help NOTHING.
Man, I'm very angry with this problem does not get solved in anyway.

[bob3160]

Tech, I have been able to suscessfully restore WIN 7 x64 SP1 multiple times with Avast 6 installed.

I've also not had any problems with system restore on Win7 on a 32 bit system.

[DonZ63]

I wonder if this will do the trick prior to performing a WIN 7 system restore?

In the Avast GUI Troubleshooting section:

- uncheck Enable rootkit scanning at system startup.
- uncheck Enable Avast! self-defense module.
- checkmark Load Avast services only after loading other system services.

I am learning toward Enable Avast! self-defense module as the culprit.

[Lisandro]

Self defense was off. System restore worked. Avast repair is a joke.

[DonZ63]

For what it is worth, Avast not alone with system restore issues. Symantec's NIS has issues. So much so, its forum recommends a total NIS reinstall after a system restore. From what I can gather, issues are the same - NIS modules are out of sync with retored OS components.

The culprit from what I can tell is all the modern AVs are using .dll injection to enforce OS component integrity.

[Lisandro]

For what it is worth, Avast not alone with system restore issues.

Worse for avast...
A known problem not corrected.
Not even acknowledged.
Not even they seem to have interest on it...

[Tgell]

Self defense was off. System restore worked. Avast repair is a joke.

So with Self-Defense off before a system restore, system restore will always work? Or only sometimes.

[Lisandro]

So with Self-Defense off before a system restore, system restore will always work? Or only sometimes.

Always? No, I can't say that.
But, when it works, avast get messed.

[DonZ63]

I guess I am somewhat puzzled as to why you don't test using a VM? VMWare's VM takes about 10 mins. to set up.

Or, take an image backup before testing? I use Paragon's software and always image from a bootable CD with WIN PE on it. Image of my 40 GB partition takes 5 min. max. I never had an image restore fail when imaging off of a Paragon boot CD with WIN PE on it.

BTW - WIN 7 includes an image backup/restore utility. I haven't used it so can't vouch for it.

[bob3160]

BTW - WIN 7 includes an image backup/restore utility. I haven't used it so can't vouch for it.

@DonZ63
The Win7 image backup is very reliable but isn't the same as the System Restore function.
Making an image backup also takes a great deal more time and certainly isn't something
you'll do before trying a new program. 

[DonZ63]

Any good imaging software will allow for full and incremental image backups. Also the incremental imaging can run in Windows in the background. Paragon calls that "hot processing" I believe. Incremental image backups only contain system changes since the last full backup. A typical senerio is do a full image backup weekly and incremental ones daily.

Bottom line, you can do imaging incrementally and not even know it's running. The drawback is the image restore is a bit more complicated since you have to restore the last full image backup and then each of the incremental ones. Most good imaging software will automate most of this.

I am just old fashioned and don't trust imaging out of Windows.

As far as if it is an appropriate solution for a single program installation is relative. A malware infection is a single program install in reality.

In a single PC test environment, a virtual machine is the preferred platform I would say.

Actually, more and more people are creating a VM just to run their browser from. Get infected, no problem. Re-create the VM or reload from a backup. There are resource considerations with a VM. WMWare is light on resources, Microsoft's VM is a pig.