Windows 98 machine seems to be working fine now. There have been other problems with this machine before, and I have not had a chance since it came up to see what may have been the problem.
Windows XP machine does have Norton installed, but it is not active. It was disable due to some unknown software inside Norton. Heard about your product (with many accolades) so installed and ran. After initial install, rebooted the machine as directed, ran virus scan and all ran fine. No viruses found. As far as I know, none of the children used this computer from Wednesday night when I did all of this, and Thursday night when I could bring it up.
That is the reason for my question. This is pretty much an out of the box Dell 8250, 256 meg, 30 gig hard drive, Windows XP Home, Norton (not running, but installed). All I did Wednesday night was Avast 4 install and virus scan.