Drag & drop doesn't work

[dcollins]

I recently installed free home edition (among other things) and lately I've had the experience that drag and drop stops working (cannot drag and drop icons on desktop or from within Explorer windows).

Since I've downloaded several new products, I'm not sure who's the culprit.

Anyone else seen this behavior?

[igor]

What operating system do you use?

[dcollins]

What operating system do you use?

Win95 - limping along 'til I get my new computer!

(Sorry I took so long to reply ... I've been out of town ... hope you can still help)

[igor]

Oh yes, I've seen a similar problem a few times. As far as I remember, Google reveals quite many hits for this problem, without any relevance to avast!.
It seems (but this is really just a wild guess) that installing avast! somehow changes the order of some initializations performed during the Windows boot (for example, OLE might be initialized earlier with avast! that without) - which results in described problems, probably due to some glitches in Windows 95 itself.
I'm afraid I don't have any solution... some of the Google results suggested that upgrading Internet Explorer to a newer version might help. I think it's worth trying (if you have a very old version of IE right now), but I can't guarantee it will help 

[dcollins]

It is true that I now seem to have some race conditions in Win95 boot.  For example, on boot, if I dismiss the network login dialog too soon, I get a major crash ... and it does appear that what I need to wait for is Avast's boot up stuff ... if I let ... whatever it is ... finish before dismissing the login dialog, everything goes OK.

Who knows what other stuff (drag/drop) is affected in more subtle ways by boot up race conditions?  I guess I'll have to keep limping along until I get my new computer ... it's gonna be a mac!

[dcollins]

Follow up:

I uninstalled avast and the problem goes away.  Clearly, there is strange interaction between avast and windows95 at boot-up.  Not sure how important this is given the status of win95 these days ... but since avast claims to work with win95, I suppose it should be of some concern.

This problem "feels" like a registry set-up issue.  ... Some kind of interaction with Explorer (not IE ... explorer)?? ... or permissions??

One other clue:  If VRDB icon shows up in taskbar after boot, then drag/drop (and other GUI file functions) seem to work normall ... but if VRDB icon doesn't show up ... then I see the problem of not being able to drag and drop.

This behavior suggests a boot-up race condition ... or some other boot up condition ... that triggers the problem.