So i experienced more windows startup errors...the most concerning one said that the user profile service was locked by avast. After that i started seeing really slow boot up. Not sure but I think something got corrupted. So I took the following steps, uninstalled avast, system restore, restored windows to before avast installation, and reinstalled Avast but AFTER FIRST disabling windows defender. Much better. Defender was disabled with following registry entry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Defender]
"DisableAntiSpyware"=dword:00000001