Avira Support Forum

Well I've been diagnosing a problem for a friend of mine for 2 days. And we finally had a break though as to what the problem is. Unfortunately the issue is Avira The fix for the issue is resolved by going to Avira Configuration, make sure your in Expert Mode. Click on General, Click on Security, then Uncheck Advanced process protection.

Now for the long story.....

A friend of mine just put together the dream machine of a computer. So I was wanting to come over and check it out and see how it runs. Well it's a nice brand new ASUS MB with Core i7 3930K Processor, 16 gigs of 1866mhz Ram, Mushkin 90gig SSDx2 (raid 0), and 4x 2TB WD Drives in Raid 5. With a machine like this figured everything was going to be simple. Build the machine, load raid drivers, install windows, do SSD optimizations, load windows hardware drivers, loading third party software, and install Avira.

Well all of the above worked with the exception of Remote Desktop(RDP) at the end of the loading all of our software, however RDP did initially work when we first loaded the OS, but didn't check again till we loaded everything. (Prob our first mistake....)

With several other machines ranging from windows/Linux/Mac, and we tried to RDP from these machines into this machine, it would prompt you for user credentials, as soon as you entered them, it appeared that something tried to popup, but them immediately disappeared with no errors. So surely I thought it was just a user configuration error. Did the normal troubleshooting techniques, checked windows firewall to make sure 3389 was open. Still didn't work, disabled windows firewall. Still didn't work. Checked to make sure administrators were allowed, they were. Added an additional admin user and tried those admin credentials. Still nothing. Changed RDP security feature to less secure, meaning do not use NLA. Even with less secure option set, firewall disabled, both machines on same local subnet, users is allowed to remote in. Nothing worked. Even tried to disable Avira Realtime Protection. Still nothing..... At this point we were sure it was driver related, or windows updates. (So we thought...)

During all of this something just didn't seem right. We were stumped that we could be prompted for user credentials, and it would immediately disconnect without no errors, popups. Even looking at Windows event logs, just looked like a user simply logged in, and logged out. So do what normal windows users do. We reload the OS and start over from scratch. Wasn't really an issue since this is a brand new machine build, and no valuable data on it at this point.

We reloaded the OS (Win 7 Ultimate SP1 64Bit). Then we installed one hardware driver at a time, and between each driver we rebooted the machine, and then RDP'd into the machine to make sure it was still working. We installed all the hardware drivers, and RDP was still working. So we scratched our heads and told our selves it had to be windows updates. So we took the same approach to the updates, we didn't want to do them all at once, so we did them in groups of 10 at a time. After each group of install, we'd reboot the machine, and we had success every time being able to RDP back into it. Installed the last of windows updates, and we were clueless. So figured what the heck lets install the rest of the third party software. Still following the same approach, install something reboot.

Finally we got down to the last thing on our list. Up to this point we could reboot however many times we wanted, and RDP worked every time. So finally the last thing to install on our list of programs was our AV, Avira Free Antivirus. Installed it, did a custom install, set all settings to maximum detection levels. Updated our AV database. Tried to RDP into the machine, then oh no..... RDP doesn't work......

So we thought it was just a fluke. Rebooted the machine, same thing try to RDP, get prompted for user credentials, then immediately get disconnected. So we figured surely if we disabled the realtime protection settings RDP should work as we now know it was Avira stopping it. Well no luck being able to RDP with Avira realtime protections disabled. So we uninstalled Avira, and now we could RDP fine. At this point we found our issue.

After trying each of the different configuration options, we finally found the setting that interferes with RDP, and it's under the configuration settings, expert mode, general, advanced process protection. If it's unchecked then RDP will work. If its checked then it doesn't. Hopefully Avira can found out the cause of the issue, cause we would like to continue to use the great product, but of course use it with all the protections enabled.

If you've read this whole thing, thanks for sticking in there to read this long story. But figured this might help somebody else out, as we did several hours of other google searches and didn't find anything explaining anybody else having symptoms like these. Of course after we found out Avira was the issue, we were able to find another forum post about something similar to this, but still not exactly the same issue. Which is the only reason why I'm typing up this post. And not knowing that Avira is the issue will make most people spend alot of time chasing down the wrong symptoms. Please Avira Fix this issue!

Sincerely,
A thankful Avira Free User

I can't help but to register for an account and reply with my thanks, funtimes. I spent a few days troubleshooting this issue, which initially I thought was caused by Windows Updates / LogMeIn / Windows Firewall.

I believe it is not really SP1 that triggered this (I can't be sure though), but I vaguely remember that the system I had this problem with was already on SP1 since last year and had no issues. It was the recent updates around February that made it surface. Probably more affected users can verify this.

For my case, I was RDPing into my home computer for some testing, and during the session some windows updates were done, and LogMeIn prompted a free upgrade to some Pro stuff with HD video and I did. After a reboot, the issue came and days of my life were gone.

Anyway, thanks a lot for voicing it out, else I would never have found the fix (cos I usually have my Avira installed first before anything else).

Regards,
Pauland

Your Welcome Pauland. This was a difficult symptom to troubleshoot. It took us a few days to narrow it down. Thankfully it was on a brand new clean system, and not on a machine where somebody had years of data on the machine. So the option of reloading, and doing an install one by one helped find the issue in the end.

I've been hoping one of the moderators/administrators, can/could verify this issue, and if there are any plans in place to get it fixed?

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to track down the exact cause.

Yesterday I installed a couple of things, including Antivir Free, and today spent several hours trying to work out why RDP had stopped working. I couldn't imagine Avira would be the problem but I uninstalled it in desperation and then RDP started working again, which led me here.

I share your hope that Avira will fix this soon.

Please post a HiJackThis-Log.

Hi funtimes,

This issue was fixed today for Avira Premium / Internet Security users after Service Pack 0.

Marco

Awesome! Thanks!

Thanks a lot!!!!!
The same problem annoying me for 2 days, I've tried some works(similar as you've tried), even traced windows log, but in vain.

I even registered an account to express my appreciation

Hardware:
Intel I7-3770
Mem: 8G
64-bit