Thursday, April 05, 2007

Ad-Aware update error

When you try to download an update for Ad-aware do you get an error that says, The downloaded definitions file could not be read, please update again ?

If so you've come to the right place !

Ad-Aware update error message : The downloaded definition file could not be read, please update again

The fix is very simple, do the following :
  1. Open My Computer
  2. Open the C: drive
  3. Open the Program Files folder
  4. Open the Lavasoft folder
  5. Right click the Ad-Aware folder and chose properties at the bottom
  6. Click the middle tab at the top called security
  7. Place a check in the box for Full control
  8. Click ok
You should now be able to update Ad-Aware with no problems.

The cause of this issue is that when Ad-Aware installs it does not grant you full control rights over the folder the program and definition file live in.

So when you try to download an update Ad-Aware tries to modify the definition files and Windows does not allow this so Ad-Aware generates an error.

The irony of it all is that Ad-Aware is the cause of it's own error due to it improperly setting the permissions on the folder it lives in.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this article its been bugging me for ages, updates were working fine up until a month or so ago? - Your solution however, how does this work in XP as there is no Security tab within properties on the folder

Admin said...

This fix worked for me on Windows XP

It didn't work for you because your hard drive partition is most likely FAT32 which doesn't have many of the security features NTFS has (what I use).

You might want to make sure the files aren't marked as read only or something else.

Anonymous said...

XP Basic and XP Pro are probably the reason tabs differ from 'Security' to 'Sharing'.

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