"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

I have used Avast for a long time, running the paid version on one computer and the free version on another. I have always thought it was a super program, often finding things going on that other programs usually miss. Until yesterday!

For some reason Avast started generating false positives so fast you could hardly keep up with them after an update. And it began shutting down and making my normally used programs unusable. Fortunately I just put everything on hold for a moment and went to Google to find many others were going through the same thing. I temporarily deactivated Avast and found my programs functioned normally. Using other methods, they tested free of any malware. Others were not so lucky and let Avast move files to the chest or even delete them.

It seems today another update has corrected the problem and things are beginning to get back to normal.

What disturbs me is the suggested ways of handling the problem of getting false positives. Put the file in the exclusion list. Zip the file and send it to us. Follow the steps below, and on and on. On the other hand they can’t say “don’t worry about it, it is not really a trojan,” just in case one of the files someone has is real.

When dealing with virus or trojan issues, it is serious business. And this would be even more so for users with little or no experience in evaluating files. Mistakes happen and Avast is not the first to experience such an issue.

It takes a lot of work to develop and maintain a program as good as Avast. Will they lose customers? I think so, they may even lose me. I know some users who deleted the offending files and now have to go through the reinstallation procedure of some of their programs or worse.

Too bad a good product produced a positive to get a negative.

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License