OK time to give the full story.
I was having a problem in that a folder, when double-clicked, would only open minimized and could not be maximized. This folders had in it shortcuts to games I and my wife liked to play. The original folder had the name Games. I renamed the folder to aGames when the problem arose and all was fine for a few days. Then the same problem. This devloped until ANY folder containing the letters g a m e s would show this problem. So I created a new folder called Play and the same sequence of event occurred. Likewise on a new folder called aPlay. This seemed to indicate that any new folder (possibly containing shortcuts for my games???) would go down the same route. Obviously I checked for invasive things (Avast, MS Antispyware, SpywareBlaster, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and I was running Process Guard. It was suggested (on another forum) that it may be a user account problem so I created a new user account and copied over the settings. This was done using a third user account so the copying was no problem. All these accounts had Administrator privileges (problem?
). This was all tied up with some other problems I had (using a Logitech mouse on a laptop which had an Alps touch-pad). Anyway, things went from bad to worse so I ended up using system restore as it was panic stations. This has solved my mouse problems (sort of) but, as I said above, Avast was there but not functioning properly. (Not surprising because I had used the uninstall feature before system restore).
Anyway, the result is that I have deleted the extra user accounts and reverted to my original one which obviously has administrator privileges but I still cannot install Avast (or AVG for that matter). The error messages on both programs boil down to being unable to create a registry entry. I tried all the things in the registry like taking ownership, upgrading the permissions, deleting all references to Avast or Alwil etc. including the prefetch and anywhere on the PC but the problem still exists. I can only assume that somehow the administrator account/s is/are corrupted and cannot install any antivirus. However, it CAN install other programs. So, is there some sort of virus there that is not detected to stop AVs from being installed? I'm not the world's greatest expert (which is why I am here) but I tend to think it's a corrupted user account and, as I now only have the one (apart from a guest account which is switched off) I don't have the expertise to go any further. I certainly don't want a complete format/reinstall. If I have missed something please ask. Any help would be appreciated (short of saying reformat).
Jim.
