I downloaded and ran all three of the programs your reply had links to. The good news is the frequency of crashes is way down to what I consider "normal" for windows.
The bad news is that to start the pc, it takes two tries with the button.
The first time, usually each morning, you can hear a fan run, and the little red lights near the button light, but it doesn't get too far, nothing appears on the screen. You hold the button in for five seconds, power it down, wait a moment, press the button and it boots normally. This happens just about every day. This also happened prior to the restor a few months ago. I think it correlates strongly with switching to Avast and then the fixes.
The second problem is that I-tunes gives me a warning when I start it that "Itunes was not properly installed. If you wish to import or burn CDs, you need to re-install Itunes." I reinstalled it after the first go around of removing the norton stuff, but I will won't bother with that again until I hear back from you. I'm pretty sure a reinstall will solve that, I just really would like to get the boot/start ups to go more smoothly.
Avast support emailed my to repair Avast when I was done removing the Norton files. I did the first time, but haven't done that since I ran the three programs in your post, maybe that would fix the startup problem. they said "Open Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs > Select avast! > Click Change / Remove > Select Repair from the menu > Click Ok"
thanks again for your help!!
