Avast Internet Security 6.0.1203 firewall conflict with sound drivers

[wyldemusick]

Windows XP Pro SP3 on a Dell Optiplex GX620 with 2Gb of memory and a 500Gb SATA hard drive, twin monitors running off of an ATI card.

Updated from Avast Free to Avast Internet Security, removing Avast Free with the aid of removal tools that cleaned it out as much as possible. Everything works mostly as advertised.

Except that I started having sound and some video issues -- the sound would get more and more choppy, and on occasion there was a USB_BUGCODE crash. Research and tweaking seemed to reduce the USB_BUGCODE crashes, which I thought were related to the power draw of my TASCAM US122 sound interface. The choppy sound issue continued...until I shut off Avast.

Further narrowing suggested that the install of Spybot S&D 2.0 beta 3 was conflicting with Avast. No problem, though there was no way to actually shut off all of the monitoring components of SS&D2 -- out with the scrubber, reinstall 1.62 and keep TeaTimer shut off.

This seemed to cure the issue...until about an hour ago. And it started again. *facepalms* I started out by shutting down Avast's real-time shields...and the issue stopped. Turn them back on...started again. So I went in an poked...turning off the firewall module for ten minutes. Issue stopped. Ten minutes later...choppy sound.

So the firewall is now off completely.

So what could be causing this? I still have the Windows firewall on, and I use Peerblock as well. Avast Free never caused this sort of issue.

[Asyn]

Did you uninstall Spybot..?

[igor]

Do you happen to use uTorrent?

[wyldemusick]

Hmmm...yes, I do. Just downloaded a Puppy Linux with it. Is there a conflict there? (I'm using, I think, 1.8.1, as later versions have had issues on this system.) I've shut down uTorrent during the course of tracking this down, thinking it might be related to the data flow, but it made no difference.

As noted above, I uninstalled Spybot 2 and deleted all traces, and reinstalled Spybot 1.62 with TeaTimer disabled. I also killed the Malwarebytes service.

The sound drivers are continuing to work just fine with the Avast firewall shut down.

[wyldemusick]

Alright, now updated to 1289, and I'm getting sound issues again even with the firewall still shut down (and now the auto sandbox) on AIS. Things will be fine for a while, and then the sound will start breaking up, which is generally fixed only by either logging out and back, or rebooting completely.

I've rolled back to TASCAM drivers, but this doesn't help. Shutting down processes doesn't help. Turning off AIS? Helps.

[JuninhoSlo]

Alright, now updated to 1289, and I'm getting sound issues again even with the firewall still shut down (and now the auto sandbox) on AIS. Things will be fine for a while, and then the sound will start breaking up, which is generally fixed only by either logging out and back, or rebooting completely.

I've rolled back to TASCAM drivers, but this doesn't help. Shutting down processes doesn't help. Turning off AIS? Helps.

What about audio drivers? At least you can repair AIS via repair function. Don,t forget restart your PC program when you done.