Greetings,
My ancient (8 year old) laptop is running Windows Vista 32-bit and has been working fine until recently. I have been having a series of network issues lately that are probably not relevant here, but seem to have started about the same time as my most recent upgrade of the Avast program. Now, I'm having another issue that worries me:
I ran a series of Windows Updates a couple of days ago, and ever since then, the main Avast service won't start. The orange logo in the systray has a big red X on it. Windows Security Center shows that my AV protection isn't running. The Services console shows the service "Avast Antivirus" with status "Starting" (should show "Started" like all other services). I can neither stop it nor kill it nor cause it to finish starting. It's stuck in limbo. None of the shields are active. I can find no way to get it out of this state.
I'm reluctant to roll back the Windows Updates without knowing what the actual problem here is. I'd like to know if anyone else has had similar problems with any recent updates, and I'm trying to estimate the chance that going through the hassle of completely uninstalling Avast then reinstalling it from scratch will actually solve the problem.
