Personally, I just remove the entry from the registry directly.
But many people won't want to be messing with their registry and the real question is why should they have to, shouldn't the ultimate fix come from avast and so far we have seen no avast input on this.
Follow up on my previous post Reply #6:
I tried to uninstall Alternative User Input as outlined in the KB Eddy gave, but none of the settings matched my system, it it refers to MS Office XP, which I don't have.
So I tried the "For additional information about how to remove CTFMon.exe, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 313176" link in the first KB article.
I then followed the additional information about how to remove CTFMon.exe, and turn off 'advanced text services.' This does ultimately disable ctfmon.exe, as A) WinPatrol Plus indicated on this change and B) was no longer listed in the task manager process list.
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Well long story short, after all of this when I came to shutdown last night, the dreaded slow shutdown in excess of 5 minutes happened again.
So does this work or was it a bit of a fluke and the issue remains intermittent rather than fixed, for me the jury is still out. It could be that this process doesn't fully remove this as there are many references to ctfmon.exe in the registry. I will remove those and see if that resolves it after I have rebooted a couple of times.