Avira Temp Place

Avira AntiVirus is one of my favourite AntiVirus programs on Windows . It’s one of the best AntiVirus which have a nice Free version, and always has high ratio (maybe top 3) against any virus testboard . If I recall correctly the good ratio was noticed since 2010 and people have appreciated Avira since then.

I’ve tried AntiVira since 2011 (actually, that’s not my PC but of a family member) , and it’s quite good from what I can see. It’s really nice to have the Free version of Avira, not only the effectiveness against virus is High (comparable to NOD32, Kaspersky) but also the usability (user experience) is better than Avast or AVG .

But somehow, recently the PC seems unstable due to lacking space in C: drive , and it turns out to be the Avira occupying spaces:

+ scaninfo(123).tmp files (~ 98MB each) in

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Avira\AntiVir Desktop\TEMP

+ also some files (~ 98MB each) with Chinese names (羟찴哼6) in

%WinDir%\system32

( C:\Windows\System32 , or C:\Windows\SysWOW64 )

After removing all those temp files, I see the free spaces in C: from 300 MB -> 9.5 GB , so the total sizes were more than 9GB !

Google also provides some clues about the problems:

http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=155821

http://bbs.avira.cn/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=1259244

(why suddenly AntiVir has such a programming flaw in 2013 ? some Chinese programmers try to make some backup or something? I have no idea, but the more spaces it grows, the more annoying it seems)

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Recommended Solutions

+ Clean up all scaninfo(XYZ).tmp files in the folder of “Directories” config, default is:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Avira\AntiVir Desktop\TEMP

+ Clean up all backup files of scaninfo (those files with Chinese names and ~ 100 MB) in

C:\Windows\System32

(and if Windows 64-bit: C:\Windows\SysWOW64 )

+ Open Avira Configuration, and set “Reports” days max 5 (about 3 days are enough)

(default 30 days seems redundant for normal users) .

+ (Optional) Open Avira Configuration, in Realtime Scan config, set Reports file size limit to 10 MB or lower (5MB is good enough) .

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Aftermath: for some reason Avira 2013 seems to not know the place to put it temp files! and that size is big enough for most of our C: drives to be considered. And as in a famous song of the “Queen” band: “Somebody better put you back into your place… ” .

./.