Hi, thanks for responding.
I frequently put all of my important documents on an external back up drive, but have not created a back up image yet (Kicks self.) I have Avast set to only do manual upgrades, but as soon as the program notifies me, I usually go ahead and install it right away.
I am concerned if it's a deeper issue at this point, because my system has just bogged down to a crawl lately and is behaving strangely. It occurs mostly at boot. System crawls almost to a point where it's unresponsive. Maybe I have too many items starting up, but then what really concerns me is that at boot something keeps turning off the behavior shield in Avast. It happened twice now and I am wondering if something got into my system. Other odd behavior is that sometimes programs that are to launch into system tray (Flux) won't execute and desktop icons won't be visible for a few moments. There don't seem to be much hard drive noise, sometimes I think my hard drive is failing, but I ran hardware diagnostics and all hardware passed.
I keep having to turn back on the Behavior Shield and a reboot will get programs to come back into the system tray. After manually activating the Behavior shield, I will reboot and Avast comes up with all shields intact. Behavior shield only malfunctions after I manually shut down windows for the night. (I'm running Windows 7/64)
I ran Malware Bytes and Malware Bytes Rootkit. System came up clean, but strange behavior still exhibits. I am now going to run Avast through a full scan to see if it finds anything.
Should I be concerned here, does it sound like an infection, or more towards a software/performance problem. I'm bringing up infection because something keeps shutting down the Behavior Shield. But then 2 antivirus programs are saying clean. (Avast Quick Scan/Malware Bytes)
Concerned about keeping virus files up to date now. I don't know how the program behaves regarding when a new version of the program has been released. Will Avast update virus files on my current version (18.5.2342) now that program version 18.6.2349 is released?
Virus definitions version installed: 1808.29-2
Thanks.