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Thursday, November 5, 2009

AvgTrayMainWnd in AVG 9.0.698 - What kind of customers help from AVG?

Out of the blue, I had this task bar button with AVG icon appearing and clicking on it reviewed the "AvgTrayMainWnd". OK, that is a bit unusual. It would not close even when the Close menu was there and enabled. Hence it fits my definition of annoying-ware. To there developer, please disable the sysmenu's Close item if you intend on showing it on task bar. 

Anyway Google reviewed several people have sought help from the AVG Official forum. My search in the forum revealed 8 messages. Since I had the same problem, I opened a few of these submissions to see what was the official view on this. The experience showed what a waste of Internet, time and energy. This is the typical robotic response:
"Just carry out a forum search on AvgTrayMainWnd & you'll see that users are being contacted by AVG Technologies." from the moderator.

Some time the manager's response is equally unhelpful:
"you will be soon contacted by AVG techsupport for some information."

What is the secrecy of this issue, which is obviously AVG's? Why not post an explanation or even a work around? If your forum cannot help your user, don't post this kind of unhelpful remark.

How does AVG know people have seen this annoying-ware appearing "that users are being contacted by AVG Technologies."? Perhaps, you should instruct user to file a bug report so that AVG could contact them. For those who have been contacted as claimed by AVG, would you mind sending me the highly secret response that they could not even disclose on their forum?

Here is my work around:
1) Download pskill.exe to say C:\Windows\system32 or a directory in the path.
2) Copy the following line to a batch file called KillAvgTrayWnd.cmd or anything you like but make sure it ends with cmd.
@Echo off
pushd "c:\program files\avg\avg9"
pskill avgtray & avgtray.exe
popd
3) Put this batch file anywhere you like, on the desktop for example.

If you have installed AVG9 to somewhere else, change the directory in the pushd command.

When that annoying button appears, just execute the batch file which terminates that annoying-ware taking that stubborn window with it and then restarts the monitor.

Alternately, just uninstall it and use another free anti-virus program with a more helpful forum.

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