No, I have to disagree. This fix does not solve my problem.
I can boot up fine. Avast 8 starts up and after a few seconds, a red X appears over the icon in the system tray.
If I open the GUI, all services are off, and it says in some places that I am registered and in others that I am NOT registered. If I try to restart any services or re-register, the computer hangs indefinitely and I have to power off and reboot. The only times I have had a successful registration have been immediately after a clean install. Then at some point later I find I have been (half) unregistered.
Several times, I have removed Avast with aswclear.exe in safe mode and reinstalled Avast. With Zone Alarm, Avast 8 never worked at all. Then I took Zone Alarm off, too, and did another clean install of Avast 8. This seemed to work. For a day or two. Then the red X showed up again (probably after the first reboot after installation finished?). I am now using Windows Firewall, with exceptions flagged for Avast. No luck.
This is a Dell Precision M90 with Windows XP SP3.
Avast 8
Zone Alarm at first, now just Windows Firewall.
All Windows updates are installed.
All Avast updates are installed.
I have used Avast for years, and I have to admit that pretty much every major update has caused a lot of headaches for a while until the bugs got worked out. This time is taking an unacceptably long time. I have wasted enough time trying to make this work. If this doesn't get fixed pronto, I may switch back to version 7, but it will only be to hold me over until I have a chance to research another program to move to.