It seems that under Windows 7 x64, Enterprise Edition, the Critical Update released by Microsoft on July 14, 2010 breaks Avast! Antivirus. The program reports that it is unable to start realtime protection (On-Access Scanner), citing a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) failure. Checking services.msc confirms that all required services are already running. Rolling back the hotfix installed on July 14th restores Avast! to functionality. Has anyone else seen this behavior?

People still use anti-virus software? Interesting...

My dad ran into an issue a week ago with avast.. it refused to start the services, refused to do an update of any kind, stating that program needed to be started first.

Updating avast via the manual installer fixed his problem. Not sure if this would take care of the issue you noticed.

Care to give us a description of what this update was for, specifically?

It is almost definitely this one:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=50965630-2A6E-4F90-A653-C0B1C1CBE2BA&displaylang=en

Sadly, I'm not surprised.

why would you be surprised? I prefer to keep my computers virus-free.

Microsoft Security Essentials seems to be relatively unobtrusive (admittedly Avast! isn't too bad - at least it's not AVG). I'm not really sure if MSE does anything or not but it permits file transfers in Live Messenger and is free.

The extent of my virus protection stretches to S&D and Malwarebyte's. My father works for McAfee so I get all the major suites for free, but I'd much rather not bloat my computer. I've found it pretty easy to (1) keep my data safe, (2) stay away from viruses, and (3) browse safely (mainly because the only sites I use are wikipedia, facebook, Cemetech, and Swivelgames.com )

Every once in a while Avast! will detect a malicious connection from a banner on a site (though not the site itself), so I appreciate the fact that it's keeping its eye out.

On the topic of the subject, for some strange reason my desktop installed a new version of the update last night around 3:30am, and this time it worked fine. Perhaps MS patched it in the meantime?

People still load banners?

Indeed, some of us don't bother with AdBlock.

People don't use NoScript?

I much prefer not being tracked quite so easily, and all the annoying advertisements get silently dropped while the less obtrusive ones that don't require JavaScript at least give site owners a chance of earning some income from my visit.

Not to mention it warns of potential XSS attacks, which seems to be the real issue you're being warned of by Avast.

There, I installed NoScript, let's see how I like it. Don't forget to add Cemetech as an exception so that SAX and PM popup notifications work.