Avast residues

Avast is a really nice antivirus program with friendly user interface and easy setup.

While it works efficiently, it amazed me that it has a really harsh internet firewall that you don’t even know it works. It occurred to me many times that it had something to do with playing lan games using old Hamachi. We could see the server hosted on the pc behind avast, but we could not connect to it. It would just start connecting forever and never coming to a point. Uninstallation of Avast resolved the problem immediately so we knew something was up wit hit. Later it showed up that even disabling only the firewall part worked well.

The new story that amazed me was also related to avast. The program itself was uninstalled, but a service remained running in the background. Even after many computer restarts. The user could connect everywhere outside but nobody could connect to him. We tried with TeamViewer – no go (
Error Code: WaitForConnectFailed ), Remote deskotp – didnt work (stalled at initializing … ), RealVNC didn’t work. Any connection to the user pc was failing. We noticed the problem because the user could not connect to an OpenVPN server, probably because the server wasn’t able to make a connection to the user. Firewall were disabled at all.

Then I notice an avast service running in task manager and it came to my mind that it shouldn’t be there as Avast was previously uninstalled. The avast process could not be killed as the administrator didn’t have enough rights (right! clear as the sky on a rainy day). Fortunately Avast provides the right tool with clear instructions on how to remove it. The process is described at http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility and easy to follow if you know what safe mode is.

After removal everything started working normally again.