Kav 5.0.383---NEVER AGAIN

For weeks I was trying to install Kaspersky 5.X on my main system that is a HP laptop. I had BSODs, system to freeze etc. With Kaspersky 4.5 I had no problems at all and I was very pleased, but the newest maybe the better...
So at last I managed to install Kaspersky personal pro 5.0.372. Because of previous problems, I did not fully trusted it as the main AV, so I had eTrust Antivirus 7.1 as realtime scanner and KAV as on-demand scanner with all the KAV drivers disabled before running in rare special circumstances. That time been I had not the idea of the on-line AV scanning.

The result was that my system configuration caused many damaged files, fortunately, not system files and many errors by eTrust. I fully uninstalled JUST KAV and everything was OK again.
Don't say about wrong settings, ADS etc. I know about these, I also read the forums with other opininions, but nothing.

So don't blame bigc73542 for his prolems with KAV just blame KAV about bad programming.
It is sad because KAV has by far the best detection engine.
In a world without KAV I just recommend Ewido guard active plus the regular AV scanner.

 

Nice, a "lets bash KAV because the moderators participate" thread

I interested to see how a long similar thread about NOD32 would survive

EDIT:
My take on BigC's post:
The title of the post is not very subtle. I can understand that this was BigC's frustration about his ruined setup. But I think a moderator should practice more restraint.
The post itself. Again, my feeling is that a moderator should not post a rant about some program, especially if other (similar) programs are offered/supported/endorsed on the forum. Members are easily influenced by moderator opinion, but there is no guarantee moderators are right

(Sorry to hear about your computer problems though, BigC)

 

Hi SSK,

I am not a moderator. I had a good experience with KAV 5.x. I had a bad experience with KAV 6.x.

Where, exactly, is the problem?

 

I don't understand your story.

1- You are not a newbie using AV-products, and for that reason, on what was your decison founded to install an AV (in this case KAV) with recommended settings?
That's asking for troubles....

2- When you make on regular base an full HD-image with a decent program, restoring that image in case of a disaster take less than 30 minutes and all problems are gone.

Maybe harsh said, but you could expect problems with your rashly acts.
With a newbie I feel pity, but you are for sure not a newbie, and therefore giving the guilt to others (KAV), that's not OK.

 

Sorry to hear about this unfortunate situation.

An anti-execution program of some type would have prevented the deletion of any system executable - .drv, .sys, .dll, etc.

A lock-down program of some type would have restored the system on a reboot.

But I'm glad all is well again!

regards,

-rich

 

Kaspersky 6.0 is beta, it is in fact not even publicbeta yet, and you're basing you experience on a testing version of a not released product, which in it's present disquise is just for ironing out as many bugs as possible until it actually reaches a level good enough for even a public beta................testing betas involves being aware of these facts and the only reason to install betasoftware is because the user is interested in this, amazingly there are many who enjoys this.

So bashing a product not even in it's final disquise or let alone the kind of stability of the finished product is just not fair. Thats the the "problem".

 

To all:

How about taking a moment to think about the general content and context of this thread. There are a few valuable messages, and they are independent of the product used:

• False positives are a fact of life.
• Because false positives can occur, it is really dicey to configure with automated clean with no user approval
• Any product can suffer from problems, they may be general or they may be very specific to a small subset of users

Despite bigC's experience with KAV, I personally believe that it is too localized a result for anyone to make a product purchase decision based on it. I run KAV WS 5.0 on some machines. The problem experienced by bigC does not appear to be a general problem. It's a major one for those impacted, but from what I could see on my own machines, it does not appear to involve MS OS system files.

As for KAV 2006, I have taken a peek at it and also tested it my machines. I think it looks to be a very strong offering and basically what I had hoped from the 5.0 release family. I've not experienced bloat on my own machines with KAV 2006. As already noted, it is beta. Since it is available on the public ftp servers, it is readily available. Although as Don has pointed out, it is not formally in public beta. That should be a caution to any interested party.

Finally, please keep the discussion focused on the technical content of the thread. Thanks.

Blue

 

Hi Don Petolas,

You are right. However, I didn't mean to "bash" a product for which I owned 6 licenses (in one iteration or another) over the last 5 years.

KAV 3.x 4.x and 5.x did not slow me down (well, 3.x did a little ). KAV 6.x did slow me down, but that is probably due to the "Beta Bloat" phenomenon common to many modern "all-in-one" software programs.

Regards,
Jim

 

Hey BigC,

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. We all have our horror stories. I hope you didn't lose anything important. I hope you don't stay down on Kaspersky. I think they are a great company that is serious about protecting comsumers from malware.

 

Hi Jim

Actually i regret using the word "Bashing", i in fact only meant to make you aware of the fact that it is not even close to being a finished product. It is in fact on my pc extremly light both memorywise & in terms of resources and general use, which is my point, the results are very preliminary.

People can dislike Kaspersky all they want IMO, i only react when i see something i think is wrong or perhaps misunderstood and thats what i did here too.

OT, i have had no trouble whatsoever with 5.0.383, as usual in my setup.

Btw. I quite like McAfee, even if this is sometimes not a popular view.

Regards

 

Hi Blue,

Yes they certainly could be configuration specific drivers. In my vernacular, "system files" are "operating system files", i.e.. those files that come with XPSP2. If the definition of system files is expanded to mean any file (i.e. including third-party files) that exists in the windows/system folders, then I understand what you are saying. Still, I would expect that someone, somewhere who is using this file would have experienced the same problem. Only Kaspersky would know for sure, and I am not sure whether they would notify users if such an issue existed. Most probably, they would fix the problem internally, if it existed, and that would be that. Unfortunately, FPs exist in all signature-based products (most egregiously in some of the anti-spyware products), which is why I never put my system into "automatic".

Cya,
Rich

 

I don't understand your story either.
KAV should work fine with customized settings AND recommended settings.
BigC choosed an ALLOWED setting in KAV and KAV made a serious mistake.
Blame the user for the bugs in KAV ? Is that what you trying to tell me ?
Weird philosophy !!! Never heard that one before

 

Erik, i'm quite sure that what Smokey meant was using Kav not with the default settings, which is "Prompt user for action, but insted using auto = delete if not able to clean.

 

See Richrf comments in this issue.

I agree with him.

BTW1: are you sure it is a mistake from KAV?
Almost all reactions on BigC's problem are the same: no problems at all with KAV 383, so why blaming KAV?

BTW2: I'm running v 383 on 3 machines, and till yet no problems, and for sure not BigC's problems.

 

I'm shocked I tell you.

Unmitigated, unformulated bashing of the finest AV in the world is a shock to my system. I almost tossed my lunch. Of course that could be because of the 6 margaritas I've had.... but don't try to change the subject on me.

I consider this outrageous abominable and appalling, atrocious and awful, disquieting and distressing.

This is worse than when my chicken was run over by the Pepsi truck. What a god-aweful mess that was. My neighbor Raul actually scraped the chicken off the street with a shovel. I appreciated that. But he threw it in the sewer. That's just not right. Animals deserve burial too.

But anyway, KAV is so good, and so strong, that the effects on one computer cannot be taked all too seriously. But what makes it shocking is it happend to BigC. That guy knows his stuff. He does not mess around, and I don't think he's getting payola from any competing company (are you??).

When the best AV and one of the best computer experts who I trust and follow lay down like this, it is bound to make some people uneasy.

 

Here the problems could have been due to either KAV or eTrust (eTrust certainly did have nasty habit of deleting install files without any prompting in one case I came across).

The key thing here IMHO is to take a full image backup before trying such a setup - Drive Snapshot is ideal for such "once off" situations since the free download has time-limited backup and unlimited restore capability (i.e. you can take a backup and restore it a couple of months later).

 

Ok, let me throw this in again but I will admit that it has nothing to do with BigC's particular problem.

If you read my post in this thread, the problem that I had with KAV, that hosed my system, had nothing to do with false positives. And while KAV, the company, may itself be very concerned about protecting our systems from the baddies, from my personal experience their tech support leaves much to be desired, in fact, it was non-existent, and for that I will "bash" them, as I do Norton and all other outfits with lousy tech support. I paid good money for that program, I should have gotten at least an "effort" or a response.

Acadia

 

First of all Yes I am a moderator here and as such I must use some restraint in my postings. But I am also human and as such I am just as entitled to an opinion as everyone else. Now to address a few of the replies in this thread, I can not believe that so many people can read my post's and replies and not understand what is being said. Is it because you are so incensed that someone would actually imply that Kav isn't perfect. No where in this thread am I bashing Kav, I am relaying my displeasure with Ver. 5.0.383 And commented that I don't like the Kav 6 beta. And there is one poster questions if I know it was kav that caused the problem. There is not one ounce of doubt that it was Kav that caused everything that happened. There would be a lot less flaming here at wilders I am sure if everyone that posted here would actually read the thread instead of skimming it and then jumping in with comments that actually dispute the information in the thread or a personal comment that serves no purpose or is put there just as a personal flame remark towards the thread starter that probably only posted to make some bit of information available. As in this thread it was started only to let the other members be aware that Kav has the ability to be very destructive through false positives. If you would have read my post's you would have seen where I admitted it was my fault for trying it with default settings anyway. And another poster said it was my fault because I wasn't running any anti execution programs, get your facts straight before accusing anyone of anything. I happen to have three such programs running and it went right through all of them. And another poster said he couldn't understand how I could blame Kav for the problem. Well seeing as how Kav falsely identified the system files as malware and deleted them just who in the hell am I supposed to blame. There have been some very good replies to this thread from a few members that actually understood what was written. And to you I say thanks. But to the others that have nothing better to do than make baseless comments and accusations I hope you eventually realize how detrimental those types of posts are and that they do nothing but take up bandwidth. This is all I have to say about the matter and as far as I am concerned it is over.

bigc

 

Of course I'm not sure and even bigC isn't able to prove it, but that doesn't whitewash other false positives.
What's the point of asking an user to remove or to keep a false positive, if he doesn't see the difference between a false positive and a real malware.
Even worse KAV doesn't see the difference either, which proves that none of these scanners can be trusted.
Expensive softwares, that don't even do their job very well.
And it's certainly not the only big problem in the security world.

What I find very funny about this thread or maybe I should cry over it :
Security softwares protect users against malwares, while
users have to protect themselves against security softwares

 

I want to go on record as a supporter and believer of BigC.

I've watched what he and the different cats (Black and Fire) say, and my system is much better. I did drop some taco meat in my keyboard, which I thought was fine, but then later, a couple of the keys stopped working.

Anyway, if I said anything that was out of line or not supportive of BigC, I without hesitation, without rumination, and certainly without compensation wholeheartedly retract them.

If Bigc and his space alien head ever left this forum, I would be very unhappy.

I just wnat to thank everybody who makes this board a great place, and I unabashadley, and unashamedly support BigC and BigD and BigE too if there are other space aliens in the line.

 

O/T - This is ridiculous, A person has a right to express a view without being harassed, sarcastically or otherwise. A majority of these posts are useless and nothing more than forum spam and trolling.

@BigC - what other programs were you running at the time? Maybe to help in narrowing down a conflict.

 

all the programs that were possibly running are in the screen shot except Trend micro. and Kerio 2.1.5 was also on it at the time.

 

What I do not understand - and following this debugging path may help isolate the problem - is this:

1) If it was an Windows system file, then it should have impacted many users, which apparently it hasn't.

2) If it was a non-Windows file (possibly in the systems directory, but it is impossible to say), then why wasn't the system able to boot in safe mode?

So, the question I have is this: What kind of file is required to boot in safe mode (BigC couldn't), but is not a Windows system file (can't be because it seems specific to BigC's machine)? A keyboard driver or mouse driver maybe? This may help narrow down the possibilities.

Rich

 

When I tried to restart the comp all I got was a black screen with white letters in the message that came up. And by the way My HP xp machine has several different system 32 files and some different drivers than my stepsons Dell xp so it could just affect a comp with the exact same file and driver set. Who knows but my comp was a special ordered custom factory built computer so who is to say what files were involved.

 

BigC,
As a moderator I appreciate your testing and switching around using various AV products. You would be doing the forest (community) here a real diservice by not alerting us to your experiences.

By the way I love your Wallpaper. Nice makes me relax just to view it.