Anyone had problems with their AV products? On all my rigs, I use AVG with no problems at all. However, at this moment in time, Grisoft doesn't provide an AV for Windows Home Server. So after checking through the WHS forums, decided to use Avast WHS edition.

For the past several days, WHS is been pretty sluggish & on accessing the WHS Console yesterday evening, it stated that it could not access due to a problem with one of Avast's files & to try again or skip - I skipped & console opened.

Tried to uninstall Avast so that I could clean up the system then reinstall, but Avast would not uninstall. On checking, found that no uninstall is provided - I don't like software companies that do this!!!

No matter what I tried, I kept getting access denied - tried a server reinstall as this would get rid of programs installed but keep data files. reinstall successful but it would not reactivate & stated that product key invalid! Did full clean install & problems solved, just have to restore backups. PITA!!!!

Avast was downloaded direct from their main site & it's either a bad coding problem or I downloaded a hacked version

I'm surprised they didn't at least have manual uninstallation instructions.

Since I haven't dealt with Avast in quite a while I can't really help too much with your current issue, however I've had trouble with many different AV applications in the past at various client sites. A corrupt exe, virus definition file or other support file can cause lots of grief, but typically the problems I've run into relate to configuration of the "on access" components - especially if you've got a lot of shared folders on the system that are mapped to drive letters.

As an example, let's say you have a folder called "C:\Videos" that you share out and have mapped as the "V:" drive (V for Videos of course!) on the administrator account. Now you can get into the rather odd situation where some AV systems think you are accessing 2 different files - one on the C: drive and one on the V: drive - even though they are really the same file. Although it's not too bad for a single user - it can really start to add up to a lot of disk access for virus checking if you add lots of RDP access (e.g. on a terminal server) which obviously will slow down your file access and overall system performance.

If you have network scanning enabled for a drive mapped on a separate server it can also slow things down, especially if you've already got AV running on the other server (once again double checking every file!). As well, scanning over a network can slow things down anyway simply due to the slower speeds associated with the network connection.

To be perfectly honest, I haven't run AV on my home server for well over a year - I'm safe with email, don't surf for porn, download warez, and don't even do any P2P anymore (could I be any duller?) so my viral exposure is pretty much next to nothing. I do online scans from trend micro and symantec every now and then just to make sure I'm good and I haven't had any viruses on my home PC in well over 5 years. Back when I was active in the warez scene and P2P stuff I used to have to clean up my system once every month or so even though I'd run two different virus scanners simultaneously (both updated daily). Now if I need to get anything "risky" I simply use a copy of one of my "base" virtualized systems so if it gets infected I simply delete the virtual disk and go back to square one.