I just installed the free version of Clam antivirus and when I try to update it just continually goes on and on and doesn't stop to show any updates done. I waited 11 minutes for it to finish updating and it didn't stop. Am I supposed to wait longer than 10 minutes? How long does an update usually take? Is it not working at all, and would that have anything to do with my operating system being Windows ME? Also, would this program be conflicting with Avast, which I also have?

ClamWin shouldn't conflict with Avast or any real-time scanner, since it is an on-demand scanner only. Some people ocasionally have a real-time scanner kick in and call an "infection" when it looks at one of the temp files ClamWin creates during an an-demand scan. You can exclude clamtmp files if that happens. I also exclude ClamWin's quarantine directory from my real-time scanner. You can always disable the real-time scanner during Clamwin's manual scans.

Win 98 users sometimes have problems with ClamWin. Do a search on these forums for update problems. There have been a rash of them lately. See if any of the posts can help you. Get back here if they don't.

A ClamWin update usually only takes a few seconds unless it has been quite a while since the last update. Sometimes there are problems with the Clam AV (Clam AV provides the scanning engine/database for ClamWin) mirror database sites, but if you wait 15 minutes or so, and try again, it usually works. Once in a while, I will have to do this a couple of times. ClamWin performs incremental updates--only updating what has changed since the last update.

Regards,

To Guitar Bob:

Thanks so much. But it's still doing it. I don't know what to do about it. I wonder if they are having technical problems, in general, with the updates feature at this time.

I had already waded through a whole bunch of Q&A's in this forum and none of the replies fit my particular complaint, and so that's why I did this post.

Is there someone I can contact at Clam to get some technical help on this problem?

I'm glad you told me the updates don't take more than a couple of minutes.

I'm not going to worry about any conflicts with Avast.

If I can't get a solution to this problem of not being able to update, I'll either have to go without any updates, or try reinstalling the program, or get a different program. I wanted Clam mainly so that I'd have something to check for spyware, and as a backup virus checker just in case Avast doesn't catch something.

Here are some posts that address updating ClamWin on older versions of Windows--at https://forums.clamwin.com/viewtopic.php?t=2443&highlight=updates+older+versions+windows on the ClamWin forum. I hope something here will help.

The ClamWin developers intend to support Win 98 (I don't know about ME), but performance of ClamWin on the older versions of Windows will no doubt degrade over time as they become unable to utilize the newer functionality.

Regards,