Recently released Avast Cleanup Premium update is giving users a lot of problems by making programs unopenable by showing error ” Windows cannot find ….exe” when users tried to launch Microsoft Office, Steam, Web browsers and other applications, Avast Software is aware of the issue and offering a fix for the same.
Yesterday Avast has released a new version for their Avast Cleanup Premium product. The update has been automatically installed on users’ devices running the program.
When users ran Avast Cleanup after receiving a prompt from the application, they’re unable to open any application or associated files on their computers.
For instance, when users tried to open Word files, they received “windows cannot find “c:\program files\microsoft office\root\office16\winword.exe”. Steam, web browsers, and other applications are also affected.
According to the reports, after running Avast Cleanup, the program has changed Debug value for every program in the registry to “C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast Cleanup\autoreactivator.exe”.
Manually fixing the issue involves making changes to the registry, here are the steps who are familiar with registry editing can follow.
1. Run “regedit” command in the Run dialog to open Registry Editor
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options
3. Delete the app folders
Or
Download and reinstall Avast Cleanup installation Package from https://honzik.avcdn.net/setup/avast-tu/release/avast_cleanup_online_setup.exe
Avast Software has pushed a fix for the issue via automatic Update to Avast Cleanup, it may take a while to propagate and available for you.
There is a lot of threads [1] [2] about this issue on the Avast forum. It appears as if Avast Cleanup has caused this issue before in the past as well, its unfortunate for the issue to happen again.
ICYDK, Avast Cleanup is formerly known as Grimefighter.
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