How to make Active Virus Shield dowload updates again
Some time ago AOL was offering Active Virus Shield – a free antivirus software based on Kaspersky antivirus engine and many people (including myself) enjoyed the nice free virus protection. Last month (August 2007) AOL started offering a free antivirus protection based on McAfee engine, which IMHO is slower and less accurate. Since then the automatic updates stopped and the files downloaded from AOL were with “Incorrect Signature” as reported by the updates. Here is how to solve the update problem even though I don’t know how long it will last:
All you need to do is to edit your c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add the following line anywhere in the file on a separate line:
127.0.0.1 download.newaol.com
Why would that work?
There is a file aol-updcfg.xml, residing in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AOL\AVP6\Data\, which contains theupdate download locations. The locations have certain priority and the top two are ftp: and http: based updates from obviously buggy download.newaol.com. Adding the hosts entry forces windows to connect to your local machine instead of download.newaol.com, and not finding an update service. The program falls back to the secondary location(s) in kaspersky labs and viola…
Enjoy while it lasts…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Antivirus, Tips & Tricks. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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