Windows 10 Anniversary Update crashing under Avast antivirus update

Intel Skylake drivers + Avast = kernel panic, BSOD

Avast has issued a rushed fix to stem blue screen of death action caused by an update that clashed with Windows 10 on some systems.

The patched patch fixes a kernel panic caused by conflicts with a Windows 10 Anniversary Update on Intel Skylake Virtualization Technology machines.

Microsoft's update sent some machines with Avast newly and already installed into blue screen of death spirals from 2 August, but most users were unaffected.

Avast quality assurance director Petr Chytil says a driver configuration caused the unforeseen crash.

"While the majority of our users didn’t have a problem, certain HW configurations didn't mix well with the update," Chytil says.

"To be specific, when the Windows 10 Anniversary Update was combined with our aswvmm.sys driver on an Intel CPU from the Skylake family with Intel VT enabled in the BIOS, the update resulted in a blue screen of death.

"This occurred during upgrades to the Windows 10 Anniversary edition from previous versions of Windows, and during clean installations of Avast Antivirus on systems already running the Anniversary Update."

He thanked users for reporting the blue screen of death crashes on its forums helping to speed remediation efforts. The final patches were issued on 5 August.

i got the bsod bc of updating avast
wow

— [muffled]™ (@snowyue7) August 5, 2016

Blue screen of death crashes are a favourite pastime of antivirus engines. Almost all have sent users into kernel panics, with some offing entire enterprise fleets. ®