As most of you know, I’m a big fan of Avira Antivir. Its a great antivirus, and it also detects many spyware programs as well.

One of my annoyances is the daily advert it displays on my screen (its actually not very annoying… I know I can get rid of the ad by paying for antivir).

The other annoying aspect, is that occasionally, it will be unable to automatically run the “realtime” scanner (avguard). The symptom is a closed umbrella symbol in the taskbar. Usually, a restart fixes it.

But when a restart doesn’t start avguard, I’ve noticed that uninstalling and reinstalling antivir will not fix the problem either.

I also tried cleaning any registry reference to antivir and avira, but the problem persists.

In the past, my “plan B” was to install AVG.

I recently stumbled onto a solution:

http://www.avira.com/en/documents/utils/tools/Fltch.zip

This seems to fix the problem very nicely.

I also learnt a bit about the XP (NT) minifilter system in the process.