Installing Avast 2015 "broke" Internet Explorer. Had to reinstall IE

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I have been hemming and hawing for a few years to update to SP3.  Worries about software and hardware incompatibilities always stopped me.  But I finally took the plunge.  Installed SP3 and got the updates including IE8.   Don't know how you moved me to action Eddy.  Must have been that Green Beret looking cap in your avatar .  I also did an image of the C drive when it had SP2 and will do one of this one with SP3.
All the best,
Annette

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One more thing.  Sad to say but also glad to say, I also made a change in my AV software after all these years after this recent experience with Avast.  I switched over to AVG.  I did a scan and AVG caught 7 problems that Avast did not catch.  One was not a problem but the other 6 definitely were.  Anyhow...

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I had a customer today with virtually identical symptoms.  An Avast update killed IE8 (In this case it was IE8) and he also had XP SP3 and a nice clean machine 1 month ago.

I could not get into the internet settings (told me they had been disabled by a policy)
Could not manage user accounts in Control Panel - just a white screen
IE stopped working - loaded but would not go to any web pages
Every time I tried to open a page in FF and Chrome it asked to save the HTML page as a file on the computer.
System restores were broken


I tried:
Uninstalling IE8 - would not uninstall as it was put on pre-SP3
No option to uninstall SP3 so tried to reinstall it.  Seemed to work right up until reboot time.  Then during the boot the OOBE process kicked in and IE8 offered to save the websites html file again so the SP3 would not reinstall.

Ran SFC - fixed nothing
Ran Chkdsk /f - fixed nothing
ran FRST - only things installed in last 30 days were Avast files (assume it did a program update)
Re-associated htm , chm, and html with IE - fixed nothing
Spent hours on it but no avail


I installed the system originally about 1 month ago and all was perfect. IE worked - updates worked - user accounts worked.  IE worked, FF and Chrome both worked.

Ended up having to do a repair of XP (reinstall over existing installation rather than repair console), reapply SP3 and 100's of updates.

Was fine after that.

I had my suspicions that Avast update had trashed his machine but did not want to believe it.  Now I hear your story I totally believe it. 

As for your tale about support.  This is common and Avast should be ashamed.  I have made complaints myself on this forum and to Avast but it seems the bad practice is like a cancer in the 3rd party support company they employ.

Paul

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I had my suspicions that Avast update had trashed his machine but did not want to believe it.  Now I hear your story I totally believe it.

Doubt it, I monitor a couple of XP systems, no problems at all there.

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I had a customer today with virtually identical symptoms.  An Avast update killed IE8 (In this case it was IE8) and he also had XP SP3 and a nice clean machine 1 month ago....

Paul

OK then.  I'm glad I posted my experience here then.  In the past, I usually uninstalled the older version of Avast and did a fresh install of the new version because I've had problems when Avast updated the program over my existing Avast.  But since the update of the program went well in October when Avast updated to the 2014 version, I thought I'd let Avast do a program update "over" the older version this time too.  Don't know if that was part of the problem but why "attack" Internet Explorer.  Oh yeah, and a similar thing happened to me with Interent Explorer.  It stopped working.  I needed to download a fresh copy of IE but didn't know the version so I opened IE browser but it wouldn't go anywhere and wouldn't let me open the:"About Internet Explorer" in the menu to find out which version it was. 
I just learned from this experience how many Windows programs are dependent upon IE and, having XP SP2 made getting information from Microsoft and getting downloads difficult.  A good thing came out of this though.  I finally updated my OS to XP SP3.
Anyhow, thanks Paul for posting your experience so I know I'm not alone with this.

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All I can say is that the chap who owned the computer installed nothing and the only files that were updated in the past month were avast files.

I can confirm that the machine was tip-top with SP3, all the patches and not a single problem when I built it.

The old guy who's PC it is does noting apart form play the odd game of checkers on his PC.

Go figure if you don't thnk Avast is to blame.........