PCTAV conflicts with other on-demand AV scanner

[PC-Pete]

Some have noted that PCTAV "locks" removable USB drives including....

Originally Posted by solcroft

I can confirm this problem. Windows refuses to release any removable media as long as PCTAV is running.

In my earlier post...

Originally Posted by PC-Pete

Hi all

For the record, I've been using PCTAV on 2 PCs in a networked & firewalled office environment since 02/01/07. Apart from the annoyances posted at http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=44963 I have nothing bad to report and am happy to continue using it. (I've also noticed that it periodically scans the floppy drive for no apparent reason but this has not caused any practical problems.)
During this period PCTAV has detected and quarantined malware in incoming emails but nothing else. Because PCTAV is new and I'm still evaluating it, I have not relied on it completely. At the end of every day, the two machines are scanned with ClamWin which has so far failed to detect anything (i.e. that PCTAV missed).
Thus I can confidently say only that PCTAV has not failed to detect anything that ClamWin has, which for all I know may have as much to do with the threat potential of our office environment as it does about the effectiveness of PCTAV......

.....Pete

....I mentioned PCTAV's periodic floppy drive scanning and ClamWin on-demand scanning. What I neglected to say at the time was due to this apparent "locking" I had to "remove" the floppy drive in the BIOS in order to do this.

With the FDD "installed", while ClamWin was scanning, the FDD LED was constantly lit, the PC slowed to a crawl, and using 'Process Explorer' I was able to see that PCTAV was using 99-100% of CPU cycles.
However With FDD "removed" it was no problem (apart from not being able to use the FDD that is.)

Hope the info helps,
Pete

[AChen]

Hi PC-Pete,

Thanks for the info.

This is a known issue, I have sent the following info to the AV developers.