After my last Avast update, Windows Media Player would no longer play any mp3 files. It gave me a “The specified key is not valid” error. I uninstalled Avast and the error went away, so Avast is clearly the problem. I searched on google and found some references to registry errors, but since uninstalling Avast fixed it I’m pretty sure it’s not a registry problem.
Does anyone know a solution to this?
Alternately, what’s a good free antivirus these days? I’ve used AVG but switched to Avast once AVG started getting a bit bloated. I can get MSE through work but I’d rather not as it occasionally makes my work computer perform like a snail on sedatives. What’s Avira like? Any other recommendations?
The system in question is an older XP box. It’s not particularly fast and doesn’t have a lot of RAM by today’s standards.
that seems strange that it wouldn’t let a program run without a virus action on its part. i’ve had Avast for periods of time flag a store bought utility as infected (i ran an earlier version of the utility as a work around). i did report the conflict to them, it eventually went away.
winamp is good for playing mp3. (500MHz Pentium III or better, 256MB RAM, 20MB Hard Disk Space, 16bit Sound Card, Windows 2000 sp4 or later )
Anyone can get MSE directly from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/mse.aspx. Are you sure whatever you are getting from work isn’t something else? I had been using AVG and Avast for many years, but have recently started using MSE and haven’t seen any performance issues, though my hardware is quite a bit newer than your seems to be.
I couldn’t install AVG or Avira on that system due to the service pack level being too low. So I upgraded the service pack and re-installed Avast and everything is fine now.
Except then I had to turn off all of the security annoyances added by later service packs, take the time to turn off automatic updates and other things that can totally F*** up your system, go turn off all of the new whiz bang features added by the new stupid windows media, and after all of that fiddling, I finally have exactly what I started with.
I loved it before the Vista and Windows 7 versions. The way it now insists on splitting the playback into a different window and hiding the playlist when that happens is super-annoying.
I particularly liked it when I could minimize it to a little tab on the taskbar with a forward, back and play/pause button that told me the song title. If I could just have that functionality back, I’d be a happy camper.
I’ve given up on Avast! I’ve had too many issue with the last few releases. One release wouldn’t let AOL run - the only way Mom gets to the internet - and so the AOL support team disabled it; leaving Mom with no antivirus software.
They were good for a while, I recommended them to everyone, but now their software has become more of an intrusion than I want from my antivirus software.