My pc specs are in my signature. For the record, I've been running the free Avast5 antivirus on a brand new Win7x64 machine since AV5's first release. Have had absolutely none of the problems many experienced with the new version. Been running like clockwork. But when I turned on the pc this morning, Windows began to load, brought up the user logon screen, but when I attempted to logon, the cursor just sat there forever spinning and never loaded my user desktop. Had to hard boot the pc off. Happened exactly the same way a second time, this time trying to log on to the admin account, to see if maybe my personal user account or section of the registry was corrupt or something. Sstill no go. So I then booted into safe mode to run a malware scan with MBAM. Nothing found. SFC /scannow found nothing. System restore back a week fixed nothing, other than it let me boot into normal mode long enough for me to discover the start button and all things on the start menu would not respond to mouse clicking, but other things on the desktop would! Bizarre, is it not? Next reboot brought up just a black screen when I tried to log on into normal mode. Each time this happened, I had to hard button boot the pc off! So then I tried booting into safe mode and clicked Repair your system, selected Startup Repair but that, too found no issues to repair.
By this time, I'm getting pretty frustrated, because while in Normal Mode, Avast said it was off and I could not invoke Services to attempt to turn AvastSvc back on! It wouldn't update. I couldn't invoke an Avast Repair successfully, either. Then, all of a sudden several things I had tried to click minutes earlier opened and their windows flickered repeatedly and all of a sudden the system seemed to be coming back to life. I immediately and this time successfully opened Services and restarted the Avast Service. All appeared OK. At this juncture, I was honestly afraid to reboot to see if the system was OK or not. But it has rebooted 3-4 times OK since, one attempt resulted in the blank screen. But next attempt worked fine.
I have no EARTHLY idea what was going on this morning! But what I do know is that throughout all of this crisis, Comodo (with D+ enabled) said it was running just fine; avast5 said it was not running, as I would expect in Safe, but also in Normal mode. Services properties kept saying Avast Service was "start
ing" (rather than "start
ed"). This odd comment of "Starting" made me realize Avast never quite booted up properly for some reason....not only locked itself up.....but locked up Windows as well, and BIG TIME! I tell you, I was about ready to get out my "Return to Out-of-Box State" Repair Disks to fix this problem, because despite repeated reboots, the pc was becoming less and less responsive. But REALLY didn't want to have to take such drastic measures and have to reinstall/reconfigure. My last complete system image was taken a month ago. so I'm glad whatever was locked up finally unlocked itself, as nothing I had tried up to that point had worked.
I'm beginning to think the Sandbox feature of Avast (which I had enabled a week or so ago) somehow "butted heads" with Comodo's internal "sandbox" technology at boot up and they both lost the tug of war! Maybe Comodo and Avast5 were effectively trying to sandbox each other!
Who knows! Anyway, in the meantime, I've turned off the sandbox feature of Avast. Hopefully that is what caused the nightmare and with it disabled, I can have my pc back.
Any thoughts?
