Avira Paltalk and Online Armor issues

posted at Avira Antivir Support Forum today:

I just upgraded to 3 years of Premium Avira Suite (having done a 30 day eval. with Firewall, so no need for Online Armor) and everything is smooth).

But my old Compaq machine has Free Avira and Online Armor as well as MalwareBytes (free).

I do use Paltalk on this machine, and neither Avira nor MalwareBytes has ever caught anything. But Online Armor reported some very suspicious activity from Paltalk. I allowed Online Armor to block certain things, and I still had a fine long session in Paltalk Tuesday night. But ever since, Online Armour has been doing OAminidumps. I SUBMIT them via the minidump submit. When I go to DELETE, the machine hangs for a long time and then reboots. I booted in safe (F8) mode and the defragger said I needed to do chkdsk /f and that it could not be performed at the moment but would be performed at next reboot. When I rebooted, out of curiosity, I chose the Ubuntu boot, and it did a bit of fixing and then Ubuntu came up fine and stable. But each time I boot into Windows, I get the same Online Armor minidump crash. I am in safe mode right now on that machine after the chkdsk /f successfully ran. It is allowing me to do a defrag right now. As soon as that finishes, I think I shall delete Online Armor, with the assumption that the OAdump business will go away. I do wonder about the Paltalk issues, but I really enjoy Paltalk, and I know so many people around the world who use it, so it cannot be too malicious or destructive. I shall also post this at Online Armor’s forum, but I am curious to get the feedback from people here. Thanks for your great support!

Someone suggested at Avira that it would make more sense to tell Tall Emu, the makers of Online Armor, to which I reply:

[quote='Farger',index.php?page=Thread&postID=875210#post875210]HI WilliamBuell,

I think that more reasonable will be to ask Tallemu about this :S[/quote]

Of course I am going to tell Tallemu about this, but it IS a legitimate Avira issue with regard to the question of whether Paltalk is doing something questionable, and is escaping the attention of Avira AND malwarebytes.

The two strange things that happened with regard to Online Armor and Paltalk are that Paltalk when I first launched it, tried to access my drive directly, and Online Armor said this is a very suspicious activity. The other thing, which I blocked, had something to do with some key.dll. I didnt like the looks of it, so I blocked it, but Paltalk launched fine and I was in it for an hour. But after that, all this crash business started.

I was marveling to myself how a firewall can detect suspicious activity which an AV scanner might miss. So, this in itself is a valid issue to raise on the Avira forum, NAMELY, what can be said about those suspicious activities which only a Firewall can catch? There is one antivirus someone recommended to me which supposedly detects suspicious activity and can catch a virus or malware on DAY ZERO. I am perfectly happy with Avira Premium Suite on my wife’s computer, because I want everything integrated and straight foward, and the Avira fire wall is not “in your face” every other minute with questions.

A side note of interest: I find that I am able to access Paltalk on my Ubuntu machine via Firefox. Initially, I could not get audio or mic to work, but then Firefox installed an Adobe flash update, and suddenly it was working. So, I imagine I would be safe from Paltalk monkey business on an Ubuntu machine in a Firefox browser.

Danger in removing XP User Profile?

Posted at bleepingcomputer.com forum

My boss gave me his old XP after his company closed. There are two users on it, his name, and my name.

Is there any danger if I delete his user name, and just use mine. I am not certain if there is some administrator password.
I know that I have full admin rights. I have removed most of the old data and archived it on a USB Mybook and on a USB Scancor 64 gig. I feel it would free up some resources if I delete his old profile. On the other hand, I would regret it if I deleted his profile and the machine stopped working properly, since I do not have the original install disks for Windows XP, and there is no real problem in leaving his user profile there and just never using it.

Also, I dont really have the expertise to reinstall Windows. And his machine also has some software that we find useful, like Quick Books, which would be difficult for me to reinstall. I suppose I am really answering my own question, namely, it is better to leave well enough alone, and, if it aint broke, dont fix it.

We did have a second XP at work that had all sorts of problems with the 4 of the user accounts. We had to give that machine to someone who purchased parts of the old company. But I did not dare delete those other user accounts, I just changed the name to DO NOT USE, and put a password on them, to discourage someone from accidentally getting into them.

I also had one strange experience with that particular machine. I purchased a CHEAP USB extender, and installing it seemed to mess up the machine. I think if I had purchased a Belkin, or some quality brand, then the problem would not have happend. But ever since that experience, I am hesitant to try a USB port extender, fearing that it will mess up a machine.

One machine we have at home, a Dell XP professional, is five or more years old. I was always afraid to mess around with it, fearing it would stop working. When I got 2 extra machines, I felt like I should take courage and try to really fix up the first machine, and take some risks. I had always used AVG by Grisoft free antivirus, for about 8 years, on an old Compaq which became useless, and then on this XP. It did seem to give some false positives. ANd what was HILARIOUS, when I installed malwarebytes, it flagged it as MALWARE! Ha ha! I had an old copy of free Sygate firewall, which was great in its day, but had stopped working. And I had a Norton firewall which we never updated because it would have cost money.

So, I decided on Avira Antivir FREE, and their forum was VERY helpful in giving me the courage to take some risks and clean up that machine. I uninstalled AVG, Sygate and Norton. Then they pointed me to two different uninstall utilities provided by Norton and McAfee to remove ALL traces of those programs left behind by normal uninstall methods, since those traces might interfere with Avira. So many people praised malwarebytes.org that I started using it all the time, and it was NOT malware as Avg claimed. The Avira forum directed me to Online Armour free firewall which works great.

Many at the Avira forum also swear by Ccleaner which has a registry cleaner. You can analyze the registry, make a copy of it which I have successfully used to RESTORE, and then, do things in tiny steps. You dont want to tell it to repair everything at once. If you have to restore then just boot into save mode, right click on the registry backup and it offers you the option to MERGE those entries back into the registry.

I must say that the older a machine gets, and the more you install and uninstall (plus the occasional virus or trojan), the flakier the operating system gets, until one reaches the point where the only option is to do a fresh install of the original operating system, or make it a pure Ubuntu machine.

I have always felt more comfortable with a desktop that comes with a RESTORE DISK, than with some laptop (like the old Dell laptops of 8 years ago, that had NO restore disk, and required a skilled technician to spend an hour or two reinstalling drivers). I am looking forward to the day when I can do everything with something like Ubuntu, and can always REINSTALL to the latest version and start over with a clean slate. AND the more that we have in the Internet “CLOUD” and not tied to some expensive proprietary software on our hard drive, difficult or impossible to reinstall, then the easier it is for us to resort to an OS reinstall as a solution to our problems. AND if we regularly back up everything, and plan ahead with libraries of what we installed and how we installed it, then recovery is perhaps only a weekend’s worth of work for “the weekend warrior”.

I am finding delicious.com book mark utility combined with a wordpress blog and clipperz.com for password storage to be a great tool to document everything I am doing, and also to share what I have learned with others who are trying to accomplish the same sorts of things.

Post at bleepingcomputer.com

I realize you are overwhelmed at times and could not get to my post.

Please consider this solved.

My JHOOS experience inspired me to dig deeply into Avira Antivir support forum.

Part of my concern was that repeated scans by malwarebytes and avira, both in normal windows mode and save mode, did not seem to eliminate my problem. Avira support volunteers suspected that there were remnants of old McAfee and Norton installations which can only be removed by special and two special and little know uninstall utilities provided by McAfee/Symantic. Once I ran those uninstall utilities, Avira and and Malwarebytes were able to do their job, and I had a clean system. Then, I inquired which is the best firewall which would be compatible with Avira and was directed to Online Armor. Online Armor, in turn, periodically points a finger of suspicion at some file, and I can then google on it, and block it if I feel uncomfortable. I feel that the worst that will happen is that some other important application will cease to function correctly, and then I can unblock it, and that it is better to err on the side of caution than on the side of complacency.

Another tool which many speak well of but which always scared me is Ccleaner. When I saw so many people using it in the AV and Firewall forums, I took courage and experimented with it on the oldest and least important machine. It REALLY helped me with the old Compaq, because it quickly found and deleted 40 meg of temp files that I could not have manually found so quickly, and there was something buried in those that was giving Avira a hard time.

The scariest thing to me is REGISTRY. But Ccleaner allows you to make a backup before each change, and you can restore if something goes wrong. The real wisdom is to realize that one SHOULD NOT automatically clean up everything that the cleaner finds, but do a little at a time, and be ready to restore.

I have decided that it is good to join various fine forums like this and keep well informed about what problems others may be having.

Someone gave me their old Compaq XP from college (2002) and it was LOADED with 100 serious viruses and trojans even though it had a Sygate firewall (back when that was free) and symantec and spybot search and destroy and spyware blaster. But then, a college student may be too distracted to really stay on top of such AV and firewall software, update signatures, run scans, etc. The old Compaq is now clean and protected, and I can affored to take some risks with it and explore the unknown, so I did a Wubi Ubuntu install, which is blowing my mind away with awe and joy, since I never thought it would be so user friendly.

Thanks to all of you in all these fine forums! United we stand, divided we fall!

Compaq Adventures in Virus-Land

I went STRAIGHT up to J&R and bought a $30 Belkin USB Wi-Fi just like the one I installed on the old computer from work.

I wanted to be very conservative and buy only that, until I could see that this old Compaq works well with it.

It took me a couple of hours to make the Belkin recognize our Verizon Wireless, partly possibly because the Compaq, though XP, is only Service Pack 2, and hasn’t kept up with upgrades.

The Compaq machine automatically recognized the Belkin laser mouse from my boss’s machine, but did not recognize the USB keyboard. The keyboard from our original machine, non-usb, does work. Then I went back to Lourdes and got the old keyboard that was on the desk, and it works perfectly being non-USB as well.

The NEXT thing I did was install Avira-Antivir free antivirus, and also another scanner which they recommend from malwarebytes.com.

I spent about four hours scanning and rescanning both in normal windows mode and in SAFE (F8) mode, and found OVER 100 TROJAN AND VIRUS INFECTIONS. I was shocked because Bryan DID have several anti-virus programs AND an old free firewall that I had installed (Sygate, which was bought out by Symantec some years ago, and is no longer free).

After several hours, I got the machine totally clean of malware, and then I downloaded the free firewall, Online Armor. Then came an 2 or three hours of “teaching” the firewall what is permitted/trusted and what is not. One the firewall was working ok, I then downloaded another highly recommended product, Ccleaner, which was able to quickly remove 40 megs of temporary files.

Finally, I did something I have always been itching to do! I used the WUBI installer for Ubuntu Linux, which is the easiest and least disruptive of all Windows Linux alternatives, as it DOES NOT REPARTITION the drive into a windows partition and a Linux partition. All it does is change the BOOT up to offer a Windows choice or an Ubuntu choice. It took about an hour to download and install.

Then came the fun part of booting up in Ubuntu Linux for the first time. The Wubi install is so smooth and automatic! And the Ubuntu desktop looks every bit as nice as Windows. I had no idea what to expect, and thought perhaps it would be something more DOS-like and primitive, with only a command line interface, like the old DOS days.

It took me about four hours to get Ubuntu to recognize the wi-fi and access the Internet, because there are not clear instructions, so I just had to click on every imaginable place, and try all sorts of WEP key/address combinations, but finally, I WAS ON-LINE!

I started all these efforts right after I left you, which was around noon, and I worked straight through until 6 a.m. this morning, when I finally was satisfied with my progress, and could not keep my eyes open another minute.

As soon as Ubuntu was connected to the Internet, the NEXT breathtaking thing was to click on FIREFOX browser (which comes ready installed in Ubuntu) and see that it feels JUST like being in a browser in Windows! So the first think I did was go to my Plurk (which is like Twitter, a microblog, but much more fun and interactive, and much easier to meet technical and intellectual types like programmers and teachers), and lose my Linux virginity my making my first post a PLURK post. Next I logged into Facebook, to make that my second post.

Ubuntu comes with all sorts of ready to use programs including I think Open Office which is the Linux shareware offering for Microsoft office, with spreadsheet, word processor, etc.

Unix came a long way to get to Linux, and Linux came a long way to get to Ubuntu, and Ubuntu came a long way to get to an easy Windows friendly installer like Wubi. But one can easily see why much of the World is attracted to an open-source shareware environment, even if it is less slick and more work compared to Micro$oft, with all their proprietary software which may one day be shelved/abandoned.

By the way, things like the Google search engine, are written in open source languages like Python, which is free for anyone to develop/support/enhance. Why write a massive application in some proprietary language/operating system, and then be at the mercy of that for-profit Corporation, and the vicissitudes of the marketplace and world economy.

(A side note: one article on the emergence of the European Common Union points out that they have enough clout to force Microsoft to conform to their demands, but the American government was not successful in a similar dispute with Microsoft.)

It is no wonder that many developed countries like Switzerland (as just one example) have declared that Linux is to be a required standard for all educational institutions.

The same praises may be given to open source software like Apache (an internet server), MySQL (a free database) and pHp (a programming language that interacts in a browser on the client side and interacts with MySQL on the provider/server side).
Packages of those three that run on Windows are called by the acronym WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and such a package that runs under Linux is called LAMP.

Now I must post at the Avira anti-virus support forum and the Online Armor support forum to ask how their products can best be made to integrate with Ubuntu.

I think my next purchase will be a $10 Belkin laser mouse (Microsoft also had one for $10 but a technician told me that the Belkin’s last a bit longer). And I will get a decent power strip with a long cord. So all I will need is that monitor you mentioned, which I am sure will be adequate.

At some point I want to get one of those deals from Sancor that offers 6 or 12 memory sticks 2 gig on a shrink-wrapped board, then that would be useful, because I am learning of ways to format them into useful things like Avira Rescue disks that one can even BOOT from, should the machine become unbootable from malware.

Finding and removing lots of viruses is as much fun as squeezing zits (so gross, yet so true.)

And you can see how much MORE fun I had that simply getting a new machine (which is not what it is really about at all). When I have a spare machine, like Bryan’s then I can afford to be far more bold and daring in trying out things like REGISTRY cleaners (Ccleaner) and Ubuntu installs.

Oh, and around 3am, I decided to install Google’s CHROME browser (which I have never tried), simply so I could have an up-to-date browser to delete and reinstall Firefox, because the Firefox was so old that it didn’t want to upgrade. And the Internet Explorer was also too outdated to allow me to do all the Microsoft Windows updates that havent been done for several years. Finally, I discovered a way to tell Windows itself to automatically download Windows updates (because I never could get microsoft.com update feature to work in Internet Explorer browser.)

About DAZUKO from Avira for Linux

Installing DAKUZO in Linux/Ubuntu