AVG 2014 & 2015 causes problems with Wireless Network Connections in XP

I recently went through a painful system rebuild of XP Pro due to a network connections problem only to find out that the problem was caused by AVG anti virus software and the rebuild could have been avoided. None of my research of the problem prior to the rebuild revealed this as a potential problem so I wanted to post this information here to perhaps help somebody in the future with the same problem.

The symptoms of the problem are that when opening the Wireless Network Connections Status screen, and clicking on View Wireless Networks - it shows that no Wireless Networks are in range, when in fact they are. It also will not show any entries in your Preferred Networks. You can still connect to a wireless access point if you manually type in the name and security information, but it still won't show up in your Preferred Networks.

I was running AVG 2014 free version on my ThinkPad T41 Windows XP Pro SP3 when this problem appeared. It should be noted that it did not appear until several months after I have been running AVG. I discovered the problem after doing a complete reinstall and rebuild of my system. Everything was working great after the rebuild until I reinstalled AVG (this time with AVG 2015), immediately after installation the same problem occurred. I verified by uninstalling and reinstalling AVG a couple of times - each time the problem reoccurred. I finally just switched to Avast!

The problem is not universal to AVG as I have the same configuration of XP Pro and AVG 2014 running on my ThinkPad T61 and an eMachines running XP Home and AVG 2014 with no problem. Somehow my specific hardware configuration on the T41 does not work with it. It should be noted that the problem occurs regardless of wireless adapters as I had the same problem using 3 different wireless cards before I rebuilt the system.

Anyway, if anyone else suffers this unusual problem - just uninstall AVG and find a different anti virus software and your problem should be fixed.

 

Thanks for this information, it will be very helpful.