Ron Schenone

Avast 5 ‘Bombs’ Outlook User, With Word As The Editor – Anyone Know Of A Fix?

Posted by on Jan 28, 2010 | 8 Comments

Some of you may recall that last week I had installed the new Avast 5 and was going to take it for a 30 day trail run before doing a review. This came to an abrupt end last evening because Avast was causing issues with Outlook and Word when used as an editor. I look around for a fix, solution, whatever but came up empty. So this morning when I saw this comment from reader Kim, I saw that I am not the only one having this problem.

Reader Kim stated the following:

I used to use AVG (paid up version) and was ‘converted’ to CA Antivirus. This was always such a hassle to renew so went to Avast. As an anti-virus is is good, but there is an issue with Avast and MS Word/MS Outlook. If I choose Word as my email editor it bombs my Outlook. I’m on XP/Office 2003. Anyone got a fix for this?

I replied:

Kim,
Thanks for the info. I thought it was just my system that was doing this. It got so bad on my system I had to uninstall Avast last night and go back to AVG.

I’ll do an article about this issue to see if we get any help. I liked using Avast and was disturbed having to uninstall it.

Does anyone have a fix for this problem?

Comments welcome.

Original article is here.

  • mhz

    I don’t use it, but just based on your description, I would have to guess that Word immediately creates some temporary files, and the virus scanner perceives these as attackers, and forcefully deletes them.

    Unless the virus scanner installs an add-in specifically into Outlook for virus checking. In that case, it could be any sort of bad programming that might cause the crash.

    Too bad.

  • Tomas Nemec

    Ron,
    sorry to hear that you are having issues running avast5. I just stumbled upon your site whilst doing an internet survey looking for potential issues as the product is still very young. Here in avast we are trying hard to address all the issues our users might be having. Please send me an email describing in greater detail your problems and I will try my best to fix them.

    Regards,
    Tom

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

    Hello Thomas,
    Would you kindly let me know when the issues are fixed? I enjoyed using Avast. But I need Outlook to work properly.
    TIA, Ron

  • http://thevirusfighter.blogspot.com/ Ron – The Virusfighter

    I wonder if their is a setting to enable or disable scanning of E-Mails within Avast?
    If so perhaps turning off the E-Mail scanning feature would
    stop the Outlook crashing issue – which would perhaps be a good work around.
    Anyone have Avast installed that could check the settings and see if it alleviates the problem with Outlook 2003 using Word as the editor problem with crashing?

  • Dave Kidd

    I have been having the same issues with Avast and Outlook 2007 for a long time, and I was hoping v5 would have fixed it, but no…at first…

    Then after some digging around I resolved the issue completely by a combination of running Outlook’s Office Diagnostics (found under Help) and then deleting a file called outcmd.dat, which apparently is the source of a number of issues with Outlook.

    I can now run Outlook 2007 with Word as the editor AND have the Avast5 plugin enabled and I have NO issues whatsoever :)

    Hope this helps!

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      Hello Dave Kidd,
      Thanks for the information. I’ll give it a try.
      Regards, Ron

  • http://www.ibsi-us.com it support tampa

    i am having issues with Avast 4.8 network edition running with MS Outlook 2007.
    I had to disable the avast in order to use Outlook.
    Is anybody else having the same issue?

  • mark

    Dave,
    what lead you to delete the file called “outcmd.dat” i think its mighty dangerous to just take someone word and delete a .dat file.

    Mark