Solved: Unable to uninstalled Avast Free - stuck at unregister firewall

[KenE@21B]

Just had this problem on Windows 8.1

After determining that the uninstall process was going nowhere, I ran Task Manager. Under Processes saw instup.exe and another (Avast) wsc_proxy.exe running. Right-clicked on the wsc_proxy.exe and selected End Process Tree. This process terminated, several others started and terminated (quite quickly)  Repeated End Process Tree on subsequent Avast uninstaller executables until prompted to restart. Avast is now uninstalled

[DavidR]

The instup.exe handles the installation and update processes, I don't know if it is involved in the uninstall (but I think not). I just wonder if that was running an update check at the time you did your uninstall.

Ordinarily the instup.exe runs shortly after boot and periodically after that checking for updates, once it has done that it should close down and not be listed in the task manager screen.