This is what my friend said when he called me to help him out with a new computer problem. He recently upgraded to Windows 7 and reconnected his SATA burner after he had used IDE for a while due to another issue. Now, with a new operating system and brand new hardware and drivers, everything was supposed to run smoothly. But it didn’t.

Suddenly, he wasn’t able to burn anything. Whenever he tried to burn a data DVD in Nero, the burning process failed and the “Invalid Block Address” message appeared. He tried to burn with a free burning program called Ashampoo, but that failed too. He thought he had some spyware so he scanned the system and he even tested his old IDE burner, but the same error appeared.

I suspected that some program was blocking the burning process. A simple search in Google confirmed this. Many people complained that antivirus and Internet security software interfere with burning programs, especially Kaspersky. And what a coincidence: my friend had installed Kaspersky Internet Security only a few weeks earlier.

So now we located the culprit, but my friend certainly wasn’t going to uninstall Kaspersky. It’s a very good antivirus and security program and he paid over $50 for 2 years’ subscription. So all we had to do is find a way to tell Kaspersky to let Nero or Ashampoo work in peace. First we disabled Application control, but even if it had worked (it didn’t), we couldn’t keep it disabled anyway. You need this feature to work to control other programs.

This is how we finally did it, and you can too if you have the same problem: First, go to My Security Zone, then click on the Application Activity link. Once there, you’ll see the Category box. Select Trusted programs and Kaspersky will show a list of all programs that are allowed to run. Find your burning program (in our case Nero and Ashampoo), right-click on it and go to Rules for Application. In the Exclusions tab, tick the first two boxes: Do not scan and Do not monitor application activity. Click OK and that should take care of the problem.