[MachineSoul]

First of all, I'd like to express my gratitude for your work here, people and I really hope joining this forum will ease up at least one aspect of my life, since I'm obviously no computer techie.

Here's the story: I can't give you a precise information on this, but about a week now I am unable to download anything on my PC, whether I try to download with Chrome, Firefox or IE. All the downloads finish successfully, but they are always deleted afterwards, whether they are from secure websites or not; for example, Chrome tells me "Virus Detected" after a download is completed, Firefox and IE downloads simply vanish. I've disabled my antivirus program (which happens to be the paranoiac AVG, ironically)during my later attempts to download anything from the webs, no change. After a thorough scan, I did find some cookies and a few of the usual trojans AVG finds in it's scans, healed/deleted them, same result. Updates work, interestingly enough.

To me it seems it may be a web-browser related problem? Or a certain something that might prevent normal downloads, a virus, malware, trojan, worm, something AVG doesn't pick up because it's buried in deep? I wouldn't want any of my other equipment and PC's in the house to catch this thing, as my PC is basically everyone's hub at my place.

I thank everyone who took their time to read this, I hope it is informative enough, any help with this matter would be very much appreciated

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What version of windows?

Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt (Win 7 or Vista: right click on Command Prompt and Run as Administrator), Continue. Type with an Enter after each line:

regedit

Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments]


Find "ScanWithAntiVirus" in the right pane and doubleclick on it and change it to 1.


Also Check

HKEY_Current_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments]

Reboot. Does it still eat all downloads?

[RKinner]

What version of windows?

Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt (Win 7 or Vista: right click on Command Prompt and Run as Administrator), Continue. Type with an Enter after each line:

regedit

Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments]


Find "ScanWithAntiVirus" in the right pane and doubleclick on it and change it to 1.


Also Check

HKEY_Current_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments]

Reboot. Does it still eat all downloads?

[MachineSoul]

Whoops, forgot to mention the OS, yeah. Windows Vista it is. I'll try out those commands once I get home; oh boy, I'll feel so embarrassed if the whole problem was because of one variable. I'll update if anything happens, or lack thereof.

Edited by MachineSoul, 06 February 2013 - 02:07 AM.

[RKinner]

If it works this is just a work around. What I think is happening is that Windows Defender has gone bonkers.

If this doesn't work then we can try Firefox. Type in: about:config

and scroll down to where it says

browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone

Double click and it should toggle to False. Restart Firefox and try to download something. Does it work?

(You should always right click on a download and have your Anti-Virus scan it until we figure out what is going on)

IF either of these works then get Autoruns:

from
http://live.sysinter...om/autoruns.exe

Download Save and Run the program by right clicking and Run As Admin. Find and uncheck all mentions of windows defender then close autoruns and reboot.

[MachineSoul]

Well, yes, t'was but a work around. Had to change the value from 3 to 1 in the registry editor, successfully downloaded through all web-browsers, everything seems to be fine and dandy.
While I do feel embarrassed and sorry to nag you over a small problem like this, I can't thank you enough for releasing me of this nagging issue; not to mention how thankful I am that it wasn't something serious.

Once again, I thank you for taking your time over this small issue, RKinner, I just can't express my gratitude :3

[RKinner]

It really ought to work without the change. What we did was disable a security feature. (That's why it is very important to manually scan any downloads before using them as long as the security feature is disabled.) The question remains why is it doing that (calling all downloads infected). Normally I think Windows Defender is supposed to do the scan and then maybe your anti-virus. This is the second case I've seen with AVG so I suspect AVG tries to disable Windows Defender and somehow breaks it.

That's why I wanted you to run Autoruns and uncheck any Windows Defender entries. Then we could put back the registry change and see if that was the problem.

[MachineSoul]

So, basically, it was a conflict between Windows Defender and AVG, I see. Interesting little side-effect. I can guess that this problem appeared shortly after I updated AVG to 2013, which was fairly recently. I think I'll stick with AVG for a bit more, I'm too lazy to get another anti-virus, delete AVG and all the junk it will leave behind which will create other funny little glitches like this.

Again, thank you very much for your patience and prompt assistance!