For the past two days my AVG Anti-Virus hasn’t been downloading its definition updates. Instead it’s been telling me that I have an “Invalid Update Control CTF File”. I assumed this was Windows Firewall (which I have turned off) or Windows Defender (which I have throttled down), but apparently it wasn’t..
I eventually deleted all the *.CTF files in my “C:\Users\All Users\avg8\update\download” directory. That solved the problem. Hopefully this post will save someone else some time, let me know if it does..
Update – 8 Sep 2008
Because this post has received so much interest I decided to create a little program that will fix this problem for you. Simply download and run AVG Mechanic. It will detect where AVG stores those CTF files on your computer, and then tells you how many CTF files it found, and offers to delete them for you!
Update – 11 Nov 2008
Last week I received an email from one of the guys at AVG! They’ve seen this post, and they asked me if I’d consider being one of their beta testers.
Hi,
I have a problem, I tried using both this application and others – and AVG still reports a CTF file error!
What to do now?
After nothing else was working (countless searches of hidden files & folders) – there was simply no .ctf files in my XP SP3 user folder locations. Only .BIN files.
I finally read stangbat’s post above (which ref. to #129) and the batch file from AVG worked BEAUTIFULLY!
Thanks everyone for a great little blog.
Thank you !!!! Your solution worked like a charm.
I am still having problems with the .ctf file. I uninstalled and reinstalled AVG 8.5, but it still shows the invalid .ctf file whenever I try to update. I have shown the hidden files, but when I go to the …update\download place, it shows me a folder that’s called ‘ads.’ That folder is empty once I double-click on it. I even used the AVG Mechanic, but it tells me that there are no .ctf files. If there are no .ctf files, then why is the update still showing me the invalid .ctf file? I’m using Windows 7.