AVG 8 and Acronis; question

Well I goofed this morning. I had installed AVG 8, did a complete scan, and foolishly or accidentally (depending on how I tell the story), I selected all the registry keys it had labeled as threats and asked to delete them. The machine rebooted itself and came up like a virgin system: none of my bookmarks in Firefox, Outlook Express asked if I wanted to set up an account, different (virgin) program folders and icons on the desktop. You get the picture.

I have an Acronis Differential Backup from last week (one full and then one differential). I go through the doc and most of the restore screens, but not pulling the trigger; just checking out to get confident, which I am not at this point, considering what I am reading here in this forum.

Question: What is the quickest safest path for me: try to recreate what I deleted by reconfiguring all my apps (assuming I"ll ever get to the end of that) or to do the complete Acronis restore of my primary drive (which has two partitions)?

Really would appreciate any advice here,
thanks, mikey

 

I know exactly what I would do in these circumstances.
I would take out the primary drive and replace it with a new one from the local computer store. Then run a restore of the primary drive. The last step would be to boot the computer and you would be back to the point that you made the backup.

There is probably a 99.9% chance that just running a restore to the existing drive would succeed and you would have saved the price of a new drive. But I do not take any avoidable risks with my computer so I always do things the 100% safe way.

There are a lot of different things you could do to get things back to normal apart from a full image restore but your post is a bit lacking in detail about your hardware and operating system.
Do you have Windows system restore available? If so run that first and there is a fair chance that all your registry problems will be solved by that process.

Even if that is all you need I still suggest that you should get a spare drive and you can then check out your backup/restore process in a 100% safe manner.

I use AVG Version 8 free. I have so far just accepted the defaults on installation. I have not seen the problems that you have had. When I get round to it I will turn off the parts of the program that I do not need as some of the functions are covered by other means.

Xpilot

 

Mikey,
I have just had a look at the contents of my AVG virus vault. There were no virus present There were listed active x controls and a string of cookies that had been removed.
Any or all of these can be restored at any time provided you have not deleted them from the vault. Some may be just what you need. You could also look in the recycle bin for any other items.

However I still stick with my first suggestion. It really does help one to sleep easy.

Xpilot

 

Xpilot, Thank you very much for the excellent advice; your idea about checking the vault is what I will do next. You are correct; most of the AVG entries listed as threats were activex controls related to Internet Explorer.

Sorry for neglecting additional details. I am running XP SP2 with two disk config, each disk having two partitions. On the primary disk I keep the OS on partition C and program files and documents on partition D. The second disk is used for backup and is where my Acronis backup is stored.

I will let you know what happens.
mikey

 

Well, I selected all entries in virus vault and then clicked Restore, which emptied the virus vault. I then rebooted. This did not fix my problem. Makes me wonder whether this is a bug in restore, in that it may not work with registry entries.

Rereading your post, Xpilot, made me wonder whether I might have been confusing system restore with backup/restore. Turns out I had. I had already checked my Windows backups and saw nothing recent. But when I checked System Restore, I found the entry for yesterday. So I restored from yesterday.

Apparently, the restore point was set after I had uninstalled AVG7.5 but before I had installed AVG8.0. So to get back to normal, all I had to do was reinstall AVG8.

I am a happy camper and will always hold this forum and Xpilot in the highest regard.

thanks again,
mikey

 

If AVG 8 finds the same Registry entries again and offers to delete them, I'd really wonder about whether I'd use it ever. How would you know when to allow it to clean things and when to refuse?

I've never heard of an antivirus program wiping out so much good stuff, and AVG 7.5 never has done such a thing.

Are you sure it's really AVG 8 doing this?

 

True that AVG7.5 never did what AVG8.0 did in finding all those activeX controls and labeling them as a possible threat. And I still don't understand how these controls, which were within the Internet Explorer tree, could cause such widespread changes in the entire Windows interface.

What I might do, if I feel inclined, is do a Google search on these items over time to see what I can find out.

As to general deletion of other things it finds, I would Google them before deleting. AVG8.0 has a lot more features than AVG7.5; I liked using it, but I plan to be cautious going forward.
mikey

 

I just installed the free version of AVG 8.0.100. It finished it's first scan just now. It showed one false positive for a CLSID that is for the MS search engine and is not "rogue adware" as identified. That's the only error, and it's not a very serious one since I don't use that search engine.

I wonder if you got a very early version of 8.0 that had some bugs that have since been fixed. Perhpas, it would be best to stay with 7.5 for another month.

 

The free AVG 8 now includes a Spyware feature and like anything new it has a few wrinkles to work out. For now you could disable this feature until it matures a bit.