I've been using Avast as my go-to security program for a few years now, and have never encountered any real problem with it until today, when it may or may not have just deleted some key components of my copy of windows.
Encountering some trivial threat during a weekly scan, avast prompted me to try a boot scan on my computers next startup. upon doing so, it grinded to a halt about 28% through and found suspicious files that i asked to be moved to the virus chest. when i continued to the computer's actual startup, my account name and password were the same, but after logging in i was told any changes i make will be reverted after logging out, as this was "not a genuine copy of windows."
from what i've seen in 30-40 minutes of hasty googling, this problem has popped up quite a few times, and to restore the actual 'validity' of the OS (or whatever it is i no longer have) relies on the quarantined files inside Avast's 'Virus Chest', but when i check my virus chest, it's completely empty.
is there some other method of retreiving the presumably vital files that Avast deleted / moved to some alternate virus chest somewhere? if the files really WERE deleted, is there any way of reverting the changes to my OS?
if it helps at all, i'm running Windows 7 SP1 on an ASUS CG1330 (i don't think it will in this case, but it never hurts to try.)
