I just changed from Ad Aware 2007 Free to Ad Aware 2008 Free. I use a program called FSAutostart that is configured to stop and restart all background programs and non essential Windows services, which I use before gaming offline. Every time I launch FSA it takes a while to shut things down because it always hangs up on aawservice.exe.

In trying to find out what this executable does, I found it seems to be necessary for updating Ad Aware. However, Ad Aware Free has no real time protection, so why is it always running? This was the case with Ad Aware 2007 Free too, I've found aawservice.exe running in Task Manager without having launched Ad Aware and when I end the process a few seconds later it pops right back up again.

If I persist and keep ending process eventually I can launch FSA without it hanging on aawservice.exe. Is there a way to keep this service from running when Ad Aware is inactive and still retain manual updating for Ad Aware Free? This seems to be a good program for the most part, but I gotta tell ya this one thing about it is enough to make me skeptical about buying it.

HI Name User
Ad-Aware 2007 starts as a service ( have a look to services.msc )
Hope this helps
Cheerio
Raziel

OK, thanks, that just might work. I located a service called Lavasoft Ad-Aware and it was set to Automatic. I set it to Manual, launched Ad-Aware, and used the updater. It said it was updated so I don't know for sure if it will work to download updates this way but it looks good so far. Seems to me if it can verify I have the latest updates it should.

After further testing I found changing the Lavasoft Ad-Aware service to Manual doesn't really do any good. It probably keeps aawservice.exe from launching at startup but it stays running after scanning with Ad-Aware and after shutting it down in Task Manager it still pops back up. It's needlessly taking up resources as there is no real time protection or auto updates with the free version.

Can anyone tell me how to keep aawservice.exe from running in the background? Could it be that the tools (Process Watch, Host File Editor) or Tracksweep have something to do with it? I only use this program to make occaisional manual scans, I don't need any part of it running 24/7.

(EDITED)
I think I may have found out how to keep aawservice.exe from popping back up as a running process. I unchecked "Let Windows remove files at startup" under the Cleaning Engine section of Scanning. Now it doesn't pop back up in Task Manager after ending the process. It still stays running after opening Ad-Aware until I end the process though. If anyone can tell me how to set it up so aawservice.exe isn't left running after a manual scan if possible I'd appreciate it.

why is this necessary for the free version? if i stop the service, ad-aware claims this:
System error: 1810 has occurred. Description: Service is not online. Application terminates
what is the benefit of running as a service? it worked for years without this behavior.

Hi all.

Please check out this topic, it deals with this issue

http://www.lavasoftsupport.com/index.php?showtopic=18453

Hope that helps

We do not recommend disabling the service as it is main component of Ad-Aware and many other security programs as well!
This is just misinformed advice if you are disabling the service and we cannot support recommendations to do that.

Crippling the program isn't recommended because people will experience errors in other functions than just scanning.

Please do not post scripts or links to exe programs (that one was deleted).

Topic Closed.