This only happened after Avast updated itself today, version 131031-1, which went live this afternoon. Avast now warns of and quarantines kritaspecificcolorselector.dll. Possibly related is that windows repeatedly configured Krita like whenever I uninstall Krita. That started happening at the same time. I both restarted my laptop and uninstalled/re-installed Krita to see if it would help to no avail.

Krita seems to be starting up fine now but it all really threw me for a loop this evening. This was with Krita 2.7.8.23 on Windows 8.

Well... I got lots of mail recently from a bunch of windows software distribution sites and they all gave Krita a free bill of health and five to ten star awards (out of five to ten stars, of course!) -- so Krita must be safe, right

But seriously, while it's possible that my build machine has gotten infected with something, the contingency is remote, and I guess it's just that Avast is broken. Do they have a way for you to report the issue to them?

I didn't think there was anything wrong with Krita, as far as virii are concerned. I was just noting that it happened. i used their submission form to say it was a false positive and it said they would get it next time Avast updates, so probably today.

I had exactly same problem. I just added Krita catalog to exclusions and as well I reported it to avast as false positive.

You can try submitting your file to https://www.virustotal.com/
Which runs it through lots of popular AV solutions and outputs the result, which is a good measure to figure out false positives.

Avast seems to be problematic. With the XP builds the krita.exe is flagged as virus, but kritagemini.exe is ok.

All I could do, after checking with other PC's antivirus was to add the file to exceptions and sent the "False positive" report to them. Hoping it will get sorted out soon as it is quite aggressive.