What is Active Virus Shield (AVS)?
Active Virus Shield is AOL's new security offering for antivirus and anti-spyware protection. This free service is based on Kaspersky Lab's anti-malware technologies and it features some of the latest innovations present in Kaspersky Lab's products.¹

In large part, AOL security solutions are intended to address a segment of the user community that does not currently have anti-virus defenses or do not necessarily keep up-to-date with their anti-virus protection. As an important aspect of their new premium services, they have developed Active Virus Shield (AVS). AVS is available as a download only.¹

More information about this product is available here: www.activevirusshield.com

Controversy Regarding AVS End User License Agreement and Security Toolbar
AVS has come under fire regarding some portions of it's EULA. AOL is said to be promoting spam and some has gone even further and has labeled AVS as a form of adware.

Active Virus Shield's security toolbar is based on a product with a questionable reputation. An earlier version of this software, known as the Softomate toolbar, is flagged as adware by Kaspersky's own anti-virus products.²

More information can be obtained at:

http://www.castlecops.com
http://www.pcworld.com/

Regarding Commercial Usage for AVS

The EULA explicitly states that AVS is only for personal and not for commercial usage. However according to yingfan from this thread, he has received a confirmation e-mail from AOL that AVS is also free for commercial use. I would like to point out that from a legal viewpoint, it would still be illegal to use AVS commercially unless AOL changes the EULA to reflect that. The matter has also been brought up in the Kaspersky forums in this thread and the answer is still a No.

My Own Humble Opinion
I have been using AVS for some time now and I'm very satisfied with it. To date I still haven't received any "promotional materials" from AOL or if I did, maybe it has already been filtered by Gmail's spam filter. AOL has said that it would change the EULA because of the controversy but that has yet to happen.

Regarding commercial usage, my take is that AOL would want the software to be used as much as possible even commercially but I think they won't change the EULA to reflect that because that would directly comes in conflict with Kaspersky's business. In short, I guess AOL won't take any actions if you're caught using AVS commercially but it's still a NO legally.

How to: Offline Installation for AVS Without Online Activation
Note: You still need to get the license key online first. This guide is for subsequent offline installation of AVS

1) Obtain an activation code from AVS via email.

2) Generate a license key using the activation code at https://activation.kaspersky.com/

3) The next time you install AVS, make sure the .key file is in the same location as AVS setup file. That way, it won't have to activate online.

A general installation and configuration guide is available at http://www.drtweak.com. Note that AVS will flag mIRC as riskware if you enable "Potentially dangerous software..." in the Protection Menu.

¹ : Quoted directly from http://www.kaspersky.com/faq?qid=194134869
² : Quoted partially from http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126803-p...cy/article.html

This post has been edited by nessus: Jan 3 2007, 03:41 PM

Just a heads up. I've updated information regarding AVS in the first post

Yes it does . I won't post it up if I haven't tried it.

Hi mdzaboy, by the look of the pic you posted, are you running 2 network cards at once or are you running a wired and a wireless connection at once? There's a very rare issue with Kaspersky KIS v6 and I think it also applies to KAV v6 where running two network controllers would trigger the error you're getting. You could clarify the problem by disabling one of your network controllers, then restart and see if the error still occurs.

If you're running a ppoe connection, I don't really know if it would trigger the problem or not. You could try setting your modem to router mode to test it out. Try this only if the above paragraph fails to solve your problem.

Normally customers would contact Kaspersky to get a new key which eliminates the problem but because AVS is free, I think they won't provide you with tech support. There's currently no fix for the issue either. What you can do now is see if the above solutions work for you or not. If they don't you can try applying for keys until one of them works (I have no idea if this would work or not). If all else fails, use another free AV. There's a few which are pretty good

yes AVS caused a bunch of problems for me too in win 9x platforms, mostly errors with dibeng.dll which was solved with either an upgrade or a downgrade of the graphics card driver.

Glad to hear that . If its such a hassle just use another free AV.

Homework ... and shifting through a lot of stuff online

If you got specific errors regarding dibeng.dll, then it is mostly an incompatible graphics card driver.

You might want to refer to 1st post for information about commercial use

The 1st update takes quite a bit of time as it's over 7MB in size and the transfer rate is pretty slow.

Hmm...Kyusuke_FD3S can you try copying the AVS installation file to the root of your C:\ drive and try installing from there?

Giving this thread a much needed bump and also to inform eXPeri3nc3 on how I manually update AVS upon first install.

The closest I got to installing updates manually is by copying three folders from an already updated system with AVS installed and copy them to a new AVS installation before restarting the system. These three folders are

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AOL\AVP6\Bases
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AOL\AVP6\Data
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AOL\AVP6\Dskm

How I do it is I create the following folder structure AOL\AVP6, then put the three folders into it. After that I make a self extracting archive using Winrar instructing it to extract the contents to %AllUsersProfile%\Application Data.

So after initial installation of AVS, I run the winrar file, then restart the system. AVS might complain about corrupted files after the restart and it will ask you to restart again to apply updates. After the second restart, updates will be applied without any errors. Apart from the Bases folder, I don't know what exactly the other two folders do, I'll be very happy if someone could find out . If I manage to find out what files are needed exactly to update AVS without going online, I'll post a how-to on the first page then.