I have the same problem. Worse- I contacted Avast and was talked into a 'one off' solution payment, which cost me £79.99! I spent 4 HOURS in front of my computer watching an 'engineer' 'Jeffrey' investigating my computer. He could find nothing wrong my end, & eventually dropped my case. I STILL cannot access Grimefighter and I am much poorer financially.. WHAT A RIP-OFF!! I will never, ever, buy anything from Avast again, and there is no, obvious way I can find to complain to Avast about my problem.
What an awful company and what an awful product!
Richard,
I have worked in customer service in a highly technical capacity diagnosing network issues, server hardware and OS issues, as well as streaming media issues for large governmental organizations, huge corporate entities, colleges, universities, small businesses, non-profits, and people who just wanted to use our product. I supported all current versions of Windows, both server and Desktop, Linux, and Solaris. Sometimes it is not possible to gather enough information to resolve the problem. It is also not always possible to replicate a problem. In addition time is not free. Ever have an electrical problem with your car and the mechanic could not resolve it? They charge for their time with the hope of resolving the electrical issue.
Perhaps Avast! did not manage your expectations properly. This is rule number one for me in my role in customer service. The customer should always know what to expect ahead of time, including the fact that if the problem is not resolved the money paid for diagnosis will not be refunded because time is money.
I no longer expect anything to be resolved ever by anybody and since then my happiness has gone up. I also do not pay for one off technical support as I am fully aware that not all problems can be solved. I am sorry that you had to learn this the hard way just like I did about twenty years ago.
My guess is that in my case the issue is with the license key not transferring from my previous version of Avast to the new one during the upgrade. Sometimes, depending upon the product, a person should un-register their product on that one PC or server to reallocate the license to be transferred to a new computer. I did not notice a method to remove the licensing for GrimeFighter in the old version so I did not try.
If my hypothesis is correct then the fix is on Avast!'s side to clear out the registered PC for affected accounts so that it can be reapplied to the current PC, thus changing the available usage from 0/1 to 1/1. I am very familiar with this sort of thing as the products that I used to support were locked to the physical hardware and we had to have the customer request to have a new clean key provided to them. Once the license was cleared they could activate their product.
The good news is that once Avast! has a form of resolution in place they can add that to their QA stack so that this problem never happens again.
