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Arfa Daily Arfa Daily is offline
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Default OT-ish Anyone had trouble recently with Avast screwing with usenet access ?



"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 7:53 PM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/14/2012 10:34 AM, Arfa Daily wrote:


"amdx" wrote in message
...
On 1/13/2012 7:45 PM, 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

YES Arfa,
That is exactly the problem I'm having with one of my computers, (this
one)
I have two computers and each is having a different problem with
Thunderbird and newsgroups. I have a post started to Mozilla forum
regarding my other problem, after I finish it, I'll start a second
post about our shared problem.
Mikek


So do you have Avast installed ? Have you tried temporarily disabling
it
to see if it cures the problem ? Be interested to see what other info
you collect from your forum activities.

Arfa

OK, I just opened Avast went to 'Real Time Shields' and stopped the
"Mail Shield" our shared problem went away.
We need a better solution, but as of now it is Avast.
Mikek


See the post above from Lee regarding going into the Avast
troubleshooting section, and removing port 119 from the NNTP checker. I
have done this, and it has now allowed me to turn the mail shield back
on for both incoming and outgoing mail, whilst leaving usenet access
alone, and removing the problem. So that's a good interim fix, but as
you say, it would be useful to know what the real problem is so that
usenet checking can be reinstated.

Arfa

I sent our troubleshooting and solutions to Avast this morning.
Maybe on their next iteration they will fix it.
BTW, I installed my version on 11-3-11 I see a new version came out
11-30-11. Are you all using the later 11-30-11?
Mikek


I really don't understand computers to the necessary depth to say if one
method of fixing this behaviour is preferable to the other. I'm sure Adrian
or Lee or Rich might know. One of you lads care to comment ? As to the
version of Avast that I am running, it was put on when I took over this
machine, and it had W7 put on it, about 19 months ago now. I always install
any program updates that Avast says it has waiting, so it should be fully up
to date. If you right-click on the tray icon, and then open the "About
Avast" window, it will tell you the current version that you have. Mine says
that it is

6.0.1367 and definition set 120115-0

Arfa