Strange Boot Promblem with AV

[skinnyl]

Hi there,

Did a bit of searching before posting but couldn't find anything matching.

A laptop I've done a bit of work on in the past has a strange recurring problem, what it's turned on it gets as far as showing the mouse cursor and then hangs indefinitely. Nothing else on the screen.

To fix it first time round I booted in safe mode, removed Avast, rebooted and all good! Installed AVG and it was fine for about a year.

Now it's done the same thing again, twice in quick succession. If I safe mode, uninstall, reboot and reinstall its fine for bit (multiple restarts to test) then randomly crashes again. Something is obviously taking issue with the AV but I don't know where to start.

Spec:

Lenovo IdeaPad G560 Laptop
Pentium P6200 2.13GHz
500GB HDD
3GB RAM
Intel HD
Windows 7 Home Premium

I'm seeing it later and will follow the usual steps to rectify, just wondered if anyone else has seen this kind of weirdness before and has any tips?

Cheers.

 

[MonkeyBasher]

I've Seen this before with avast and avg on multiple machines all running win 7.

it's a conflict between the Av and a software firewall. Both Av vendors have multiple threads on there forums about it, they both refuse to acknowledge its there fault, and will both suggest you reinstall or use there firewall to fix it.

a newish feature of the av is an anti malware feature, designed to ensure that the auto emergency update of the av cannot be stopped by anything. 1 of the ways they do this is create a randomly named executable and add a scheduled task so it runs on the next boot. This occurs on shutdown. If your firewall is setup to prompt you to allow access, or is running on a predefined set of rules, there's a very good chance you won't see the dialog, won't update your fw and thus are fubar on next boot. The fw blocks the av update as it's an unknown process, the av gets stuck in a loop, not intending to proceed without updating and hangs the pc.

There are 3 solutions.
1. Wait a long time and eventually the desktop "may" load.
2. Press ctrlaltdel. And start a new explorer.exe process, thus loading the desktop. May also need to kill some av tasks.
3. Get rid of avast or avg.

After many weeks of reinstalling and other things I went for 3.
Avast was becoming a bloated mess of crap I didn't need and a resource hog anyway.
My dad who was the avg user. De installed, used there cleanup tool, and re installed, but he has his fw to be more automatic than me.

I now use Mse, a software fw, the fw on my router and some common sense.

Tldr check software firewall

 

[skinnyl]

Thanks for the reply.. apologies for not getting back earlier.

I'll have a look into that. I have to say that I tried MSE and it caused the same issue. After that (having already ran quite a few scans) remembered MalwareBytes and ran a full scan, it removed some malware and so far it's ok. That said, it was fine for a while last time I'd 'fixed' it so if it comes back I'll look at the firewall set up.

Cheers!