Windows98 SE - fully patched
Zone Alarm fire wall
Alwil Avast 4 Home Edition
Cable Modem
Earlier today my Avast installation announced that a program update was available. They have always been good and they have always worked so I said ok and turned it loose.
The install appeared to go just fine and when done I went back to check some email and do some surfing ... almost.
Thunderbird hung. I could see it in the ctrl-alt-del program window but nothing was happening, so I ended the program. Next I decided to open Firefox and check these forums. Same thing! Then things blue screened and my system locked up.
So I figured ok ... must have been a bad install ... so I uninstalled Avast ... cleaned it right out of my system ... registry entries and all. Now Firefox and Thunderbird worked. I downloaded Avast4 from the web site and reinstalled.
The same thing all over again. I checked my other browsers ... Opera 9 worked fine, Internet Explorer 6 worked fine, Netscape 7 died, Mozilla 1.7.7 died.
So then I did a selective startup via ms-config, disabling Avast and here I am.
The latest release of Avast 4 seems to have taken a definite dislike to Mozilla based programs. The blue screens would seem to indicate a conflict somewhere.
I'm a fairly careful surfer and I don't open unexpected email so I'll be safe for a few days before moving on to another anti virus provider. I really like Avast and hopefully this issue will be resolved fairly soon I noticed other posts having similar issues with this release. I'll watch this thread and forum for any announcements.
