4.8 Home - Hard drive light on all the time and slow pc after install - Vista

[simon15]

Had trial version of McAfee expire, so I uninstalled program. Did a clean install of Avast Home 4.8 on Vista pc (2 GB ram, 400 gb open disk space, 2.4 Ghtz processor), I installed the program / pc reboot / all ok initially / shut down pc / turn on pc / and now hard drive light constantly on and very slow access to anything. This continued for at least 10 minutes before I tried to shut down pc - very slow on shut down. Took a very long time for desktop items to appear, and when trying to access 'My Computer' to check drives, it brings up the screen but no drive info appears at all.  I uninstalled Avast and now pc acting speedy and normal.  I have same program on a couple of XP machines, and they're fine. I did this several times with the 30mb file downloaded from website - once just installed - 2nd time installed as administrator. I checked around the website for any Vista hints, but no go. Any other suggestions? Is it possible a piece of McAfee still there? I checked and did not see anything else AV wise that might be there.

[Tarq57]

There could indeed be a piece or two of McAfee lurking around.
Download the McAfee Removal Tool, run it, see how that works.
You may have to do a full removal and reinstall of Avast to get it to work properly following this. If so, the Avast uninstall utility is here.
McAfee removal tool can also be found on their own site.

[simon15]

Yep - appears it was McAfee not cleanly uninstalling. Downloaded and ran McAfee tool on affected pc - it appeared that it found some data that needed removing. Also had to do Windows update on pc too to get it up to SP2. Did reinstall Avast, and after 1 reboot and 2 shut down pc / turn on pc, the pc is acting properly now. Will keep an eye on pc, but appears this issue is closed. Don't know if it's because of Windows or the programs that will not allow a clean uninstall, forcing us to get those uninstaller cleaners.  Thank you for the advice - it worked! 

[Tarq57]

I'm glad the problem is resolved.
I don't know why sometimes "uninstalled" programs don't always uninstall cleanly, except that in the case of some security programs the various drivers and other bits are buried quite deep in the OS, and are (should) generally be removed on reboot. But a lot of the AV's provide uninstallers/removers to finish things off, including Avast, Norton, AVG, McAfee.....of course the average user might not know this.
Some programs (esp Norton and McAfee) seem to cause more problems than others with stuff they leave behind.
I've seen some programs interfere with Windows updates, and really mess things up. (And vice-versa.) And I'm not very experienced at solving these sorts of problems, so if I've seen a few of them, you could probably say it goes on a lot.