Problem now solved. A repair installation did the trick. I got sidetracked into chasing the file when I should have repaired Avast first.
I'm running Win7 64-bit. All security patches installed and only security patches installed.
After installing my new graphics card, I noticed that Avast antivirus wasn't loading. Strange. So I tried manually loading it and got this error message:
The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect.
So I looked in the event viewer and found this further information about the error:
Activation context generation failed for "C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\AvastUI.exe". Dependent Assembly Avast.VC140.CRT,processorArchitecture="x86",publicKeyToken="fcc99ee6193ebbca",type="win32",version="14.0.23918.0" could not be found. Please use sxstrace.exe for detailed diagnosis.
The same also happens with the Avast Launcher at boot.
I have a log from sxstrace if that would be helpful.
I think that it's connected to the Visual C++ redist, but I checked and I still have those installed (including the most recent 2017 one) and the closest match would be the 2015 x86 one, which is version 14.0.24215.1
