Thanks David and Eddy,
Pretty sure I am running Avast Pro on that 2core, but it's bundled up now, will resume work on it in a couple of days.
The 2core boots normally but then slowly starts to freeze from that moment on, with everything you point to with the cursor yielding the hourglass icon, so you never get past the desktop. Eventually everything freezes, no mouse control or anything. In Safe Mode there is full control of whatever is enabled in SM.
Just had a thought, if all else fails (I now have that Avast download burned to CD) could I not remove the 2core 'C' drive, place it in an external casing, then run it - as an external drive - with a full Avast scan from a healthy computer please?
Thanks again,
AV