dtcronin,
thanks for your report.
1. After login when the desktop loads its hangs after loading avast.
This is most likely a collision with another program/driver installed on your machine. It remains to find out which...
It will be some program that loads automatically on startup (like avast). To find out which programs load on startup, you can use a utility such as AutoRuns (from SysInternals)
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml . Please try to experiment with the loaded programs - try disabling them one after another... The goal is to find out which progam (together with avast) is causing it...
It may also be a driver or service, though... Do you have any extra hardware? Or connect to some unix systems?
In short, to solve this problem, we really need much more information - no one has reported such a problem to us so far...
2. Since setting up avast to check my mail i always have to enter my password when i press send/recieve in Outlookexpress. Is this something i can disable in Avast?
And after you fill it in, it works? Actually, it's not avast who's asking, it's Outlook, so you could try to set the credentials in the account settings there... (but I suppose this is what you already did).
One more question: don't you use SSL to connect to your server?
Thanks,
Vlk