- Sunday, 8 November 2009
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We had no immediate use for the silicon fabrication plant where memories were made and had to shut it down - Andy Grove - Only the Paranoid Survive
AVG offers infected users free year of service
AVG ANNOUNCED yesterday that it would be offering a free year of service after its antivirus software got confused and misidentified a key Windows system file as malware.
The security vendor identified earlier this week that user32.dll was coming up as a generic Trojan which caused a warning pop-up asking if the user wanted to delete it – unfortunately for those who say ‘yes’ they were stuck in an endless reboot cycle.
Once the floods of complaints began, AVG identified the mistake and began offering workarounds for affected users – which is fine if you’ve got someone else to look it up for you.
Yesterday however, AVG announced, "As a follow-up to the rapid distribution of recovery instructions and repair CDs, AVG Technologies is offering all affected users a free license or license extension as follows.”
This basically means a free year of AVG 8.0 service, or a free upgrade for AVG 7.5 users.
The upgrade also includes users of the free AVG antivirus service.
Once the company began apologising, it seemed to be unable to stop, "AVG Technologies apologises again for the inconvenience caused to our customers and wishes to assure our users worldwide that the company is actively putting new processes in place to avoid similar occurrences in the future.”
AVG has said that it will begin contacting affected customers beginning November 24 in order to give further instructions on this service. µ
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AVG is constantly bleating about things which it thinks are Trojans but are totally benign. One more reason to use Linux.
Only two weeks ago I uninstalled AVG 8 from my last computer. The bloat and lack of control made it too cumbersome.

Avast! is working well so far.
Saying, "the company wishes to apologize" is not the same thing as actually apologizing, and is in fact a way of avoiding just that while giving an impression they have apologized.

Their wishes are not their actions.

After the joy of recovering your system, do really want another year of the product that crashed it? 



Like most modern operating systems, Microsoft Windows supports shared libraries, collections of code which can be used by multiple processes while only being loaded once into memory. Windows terms its shared libraries Dynamic-link libraries (DLL's).

Most core Windows functionality is contained within Native Applications and a set of DLL's, which together provide the various subsystems in which code can run (Win32, SUA, Virtual DOS machine, etc.).

User32.dll
user32.dll allows programs to implement a graphical user interface. It contains basic functions, such as window management, user input, text, etc. shell32.dll uses these functions to implement Windows' standard controls, including buttons, check boxes, and input fields.
...."affected users" instead of infected? Not to be a nitpick, just saying...
They screwed up, they admitted it, and they did everything they could to make it right as quickly as possible. Great job, why can't more companies operate like this?
Well, I for one am glad to see that AVG is a) admitting their mistake and b) doing something tangible to make it right for customers. Unfortunately, some idiot will probably sue them anyway, making companies like nVidia believe that its best to deceive and deny instead of coming clean.
Pretty darn good of them, actually. (and clever too, since it's likely to get them more customers)

I doubt Symantec would do this, I doubt they'd even admit it was their fault if it happened..
Big gold star sticker for AVG for this, extending the offer to free edition customers is really going above and beyond, let's hope they go through with it at least for the currently paying customers.
That's what I've been using since AVG went nagware and unreliable.
I've been trying to uninstall AVG for weeks! No success so far.Hopefully, I'll hear from them..then I'll 'let'em have it!'
"One more reason to use Linux."
erm no. Let us not forget that the worst internet worm attack ever that took the Internet down for days was on UNIX based systems....