Having the latest antivirus program and also virus definition signature is very important to keep your computer safe from latest threats and also stability. All antivirus program has their own convenient built-in updater for you to easily update the program and virus signature. However, I noticed that the latest AVG 8 program updates seems to have lots of problems if compared to other antivirus program. Some of the error messages that I know of are “a bin file is missing”, “General error – not enough free memory, write error”, “AVG update process could not be finished due to insufficient free disk space or insufficient user rights. Disk space is fine.” and the latest one is “Invalid Update Control CTF File Error”.

One of my client’s laptop had AVG8 installed and he kept on getting the Invalid Update Control CTF File Error whenever he wants to update AVG8. The most common way of fixing a software problem is to reinstall. Unfortunately I tried reinstalling AVG8 on his computer but couldn’t fix the Invalid Update Control CTF File problem.

Finally I found an easy solution to fix the Invalid Update Control CTF File error problem during update.


Searching for CTF file on my client’s computer revealed that there are 2 CTF files which is avginfoavi.ctf and avginfowin.ctf used by AVG8 and located in All Users application data folder. I noticed that every time when you check for AVG updates, the AVG8 update manager will check the avginfoavi.ctf and avginfowin.ctf files in the update server.

Simply deleting both avginfoavi.ctf and avginfowin.ctf files fixes the Invalid Update Control CTF File error problem. There are 3 ways to delete the CTF files.

1. Search for avginfoavi.ctf and avginfowin.ctf in Windows and delete it.

2. Manually go to the folder where both of the CTF files are located and delete it. The Application Data folder is hidden and you’ll need to enable show hidden files and folders in Folder Options to see the folder.

In Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\update\download
In Windows Vista: C:\ProgramData\avg8\update\download

3. AVG has created a small executable file called deleteupdatefiles.exe that will automatically delete the download folder that contains the CTF files.

Hope that either 3 methods above will help you fix the problem in updating AVG8.