View Single Post
  #4   Report Post  
Posted to sci.electronics.repair
Ron Ron is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 314
Default OT-ish Anyone had trouble recently with Avast screwing with usenetaccess ?

On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:
A couple of nights back, my Xnews stopped working - sort of. I'd just
installed some Windoze updates. Nothing special, just the weekly
security crap, so I immediately suspected that. I removed the updates,
but still had a problem. Usenet access via Thunderbird seemed to still
be ok, as did Windows Live Mail. What was happening was that a selected
group's headers would download, and load up ok in the program. You could
pick any message anywhere in the list of headers, and from anywhere
within a thread, and the message body would download, and display
correctly. But when you then tried to select any further messages,
although the new message body appeared to download - as in you could see
a normal-looking burst of activity on the modem lights - when the new
message was then displayed, it was in fact the first one again. And so
for any message selected. All that was ever displayed was the very first
message selected.

I found this odd, as Xnews is basically a stand-alone dot exe. It does
not have to be 'installed' as such, so no real system hooks.
Never-the-less, I removed it, and reinstated it from a backup copy that
I keep on an external drive. Exactly the same. I then discovered that in
fact Thunderbird and Live Mail were also having similar problems with
access to messages, but nothing like as consistently as Xnews. Some
messages would download and display correctly, but others would lock you
into this 'same message over and over' behaviour again.

So having sat back and thought about the problem, I came to the
conclusion that about the only thing between Xnews and the news server
itself, was the virus checker. It is Avast that I use, and it has never
caused me a problem in all the time I have been using it since it first
came out. I have not authorised any updates to the core program
recently, so I was reluctant to believe that this could be the problem.
Never-the-less, when I did a bulk disable of all the shields that it had
running, the problem went away. Reinstating them one by one, it came
down to the Mail Defender shield that was causing the problem. So for
the moment, when I use Xnews, I am just invoking the "switch off shields
for 1 hour" option in Avast.

So anyone else had any problems ? Any of the computah deep-understanders
on here, got any idea what exactly Avast is doing to cause this
behaviour, or what has started it ?

Arfa


Not internet related as such, but I found yesterday that Avast prevents
some of the newer Popcap games from running. I have no problem with
email or n/gs so far running in conjunction with Avast.

Ron