Does PG make files read only,

I have spent the last week or so trying to solve problems mainly with Avast antivirus. Trying not to be too long-winded (unless asked for more info) it didn't work properly - giving error "Not enough user rights to continue" amongst others. The problem was solved by reinstalling in safe mode. During the investigation I found that some of the Avast files and, subsequently, many other files had their attributes changed to read only. This stopped updates and uninstallation on several programs until I discovered what the problem was. I had PG disabled at the time but if the files had already had their attributes changed then that would make no difference. Is this something that PG does? If not, then I seem to have been hit by something else - although can't trace anything. Any thoughts anyone please?
Jim.

 

PG won't change the attributes of a file, no.

 

OK thanks. Then maybe this is something that should be looked at but I don't know who should do the looking. This all came up (as I said) as an aside to a problem I (and others) was having with Avast antivirus on two different machines. They (Avast) have been shrugging their shoulders and blaming the problems on firwall settings and, in my case, PG settings. The net result was that, after uninstalling Avast and reinstalling in safe mode, I found that several of my programs weren't working properly. In every case a re-install fixed the problem but I had to change the attributes in every case from read only before I could uninstall them. Now I was running PG, XP firewall, MS Antispy beta, Avast antivirus, and SpywareBlaster and was running on-demand Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D at least once a week and have a router. I had reports of no virus and only a few spyware invasions and PG gave me no alerts that seemed related to this problem. So, what could have done this - and why? Could something have got in while I had PG in learning mode to install something? Could it happen if I give programs too many permissions in PG? Has there been any reports of a nasty that does this? What is the meaning of life? What are the winning lottery numbers this week?.........(walks away dribbling gently..)

 

1. Who was blaming firewall settings?
2. Which files had read-only attributes, exactly?
3. Which part of avast was reporting the "not enough rights" thing, exactly?


Thx
Vlk

 

1. One of the techies on the Avast forum.
2.Can't be exact but lots of files in lots of programs - for instance the uninstall.exe files and then many others once I actually managed to start the uninstall so that the unistall failed. Any program I needed to uninstall I ended up having to untick read only as a block of files together to cover everything as it wouldn't uninstall/delete anything marked read only.
3. Anything in Avast which needed to write to the registry. I know this implies that I didn't have admin rights but I did - in most cases anyway. I played around with the permissions which helped but didn't completely solve the problems. That was only achieved by unistalling completely. I would then get the same error if I tried to reinstall in normal mode but could install OK in safe mode. I think this was (still is) a problem with Avast but not sure if it was connected to the read only problem.