avast Free AntiVirus 7.0.1407
Windows XP Pro SP-3
Since upgrading to Avast 7.01, I've been having problems with unwanted on-demand scans (those started by a schedule or manually, not the real-time or on-access scanner).
- After installation, I went under the configs for Quick and Full scans and defined a scheduled scan for each. Unfortunately, Avast doesn't wait until my host is idle for awhile before running scan and won't abort or pause the scan if the host becomes non-idle. Since I use my host at all hours of the day, there is no time when I can schedule these on-demand scans that may not interfere with my use of my host (the scans affect responsiveness of my host). So I disabled the scheduled scans but they continued to run anyway. I'd notice there was high CPU usage and lots of disk activity at the scheduled time except those scheduled scans had already been disabled. I'd go into Avast's UI and see the scan was running (and checked that it was no longer configured to run a scheduled scan). I could stop the scan from there. However, since I disabled the scan that had previously been scheduled, it shouldn't be running at all.
- At some point, Avast's UI no longer showed a scan was running when in fact it was. So I couldn't use Avast's UI to abort the scan. One time I was about ready to reboot the computer to eliminate the high CPU usage by AvastSvc.exe when a window popped up asking if I wanted to allow a reboot of the system. So not only was this scan hidden (not visible using Avast's UI) but somehow now it was optioned to reboot my host when the scan completed. I have NEVER enabled that option in the old or new versions of Avast. I had 60 seconds to abort the reboot which I did but it would've have rebooted if I had not been present and later I would've wondered why I was at the Windows login screen.
I checked and there is no event in Task Scheduler to run the ashquick.exe quick scanner. So after defining a scheduled scan (quick and full) but after disabling the scheduled scan, they would still run. Then later I couldn't see the current scan in Avast's UI plus it was configured to reboot my computer when done with the scan. Since nothing in Avast is configured to run a scan and there's no scheduled event in Task Scheduler for Avast, how am I supposed to delete these non-scheduled scheduled and now hidden on-demand scans?
At this point, and since there's nothing I can do using Avast's UI to delete the unwanted on-demand scan, I will see what happens after uninstalling Avast, running its cleanup tool, and do another install of Avast - but this time I won't bother ever defining a scheduled scan which runs even after disabled and may become hidden from Avast's UI.
