No proiders will start

[Hypurr]

Avast was working fine on a system I was working on for a friend.  They system was infected with viruses and spyware.  I installed Avast and removed the viruses and after removing the spyware with various apps (Adaware, Spybot, MS Anti-spyware and Hijack This) and installing SP2 for Win XP the Avast providers stopped working.  The RPC service is running and the Avast services are running, but whenever I try to start a provider I get a "Operation could not be completed" error with no further indication of anything wrong in the event log.  I have removed Avast and used the Avast clean utility and reinstalled twice, but always get the same results now.

Is there anything I should check that I am overlooking?  Thanks for any help, it is much appreciated.  If you need further information please let me know.

[Lisandro]

The RPC service is running

Sure, it's an essencial Windows service... your computer should be off if it's not running.

and the Avast services are running

Are you sure all services are running? Can you restart them?

I have removed Avast and used the Avast clean utility and reinstalled twice, but always get the same results now.

Generally, the repair function should be enough... in your case, even reinstalling failed 
Are you using any other antivirus in your system?
Do you use PrevX, ProcessGuard or any other startup monitor?

[Hypurr]

The system had NAV on it, but I removed that before installing Avast.  And Avast was running fine until all of the spyware was removed.  I have double checked the services and they are running and I can stop and restart them.  There are no monitors running and everything is now working fine and the system comes up clean, but the only thing that won't run at this point is Avast.  The second time I reinstalled Avast, I did an uninstall, then used the uninstall utility and removed any traces I could find.  After rebooting there are no error messages and there is a red mark on the Avast icon and no providers will start.  It does get an updated database, so it is running, just not protecting.  Any ideas?  Thanks.

[Lisandro]

The system had NAV on it, but I removed that before installing Avast.

This seems to be the problem.

The second time I reinstalled Avast, I did an uninstall, then used the uninstall utility and removed any traces I could find.  After rebooting there are no error messages and there is a red mark on the Avast icon and no providers will start.  It does get an updated database, so it is running, just not protecting.  Any ideas?  Thanks.

See: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=12169.0
Read: Removing Norton
See: How important is it to completely remove Norton? topic.

1) Please, browse the Symantec website and download the specific uninstall tool for NAV. It will clean trash left behing by NAV (files, registry keys). You need this to proper working with avast.

2) Can you try to repair your installation? Go to Control Panel > Add/Remove programs > avast! antivirus > Remove then choose Repair function in the popup window (Repair). If this does not help, can you uninstall / boot / install / boot again?

3) You can delete folders/files under either 'Norton' or 'Symantec' folder, the others under Liveupdate folders and ApplicationData...

[Hypurr]

I will get the utility from Symantec and try it.  The weird thing is I did uninstall all of the NAV features, including live update and Avast was working fine after the first install and for a while after that.  I did try the repair feature, but that didn't seem to do any good.  So, if NAV was the problem Avast would not have run even after the first install, but it is worth a shot.  If only I could get a reason why they won't start in the error.  I will let you know what happens.  Thanks for the help.