Help! Running Boot Time and it won't stop

[akandrews]

Hi.  Thanks for any help you can give me.  I downloaded and installed Avast! free version, chose boot time and restarted.  That was 9 hours ago and the dots are still marching across the screen.  I have windows xp sp 2 on a lenova laptop with 100 gb hd.  Is this just how long it takes?  I was reading another thread and it seemed to say you can stop it with the escape key but that does not work. 

I am afraid to just force the machine to quit. 

I do not have NAV but do have mcafee, defender, spyblaster, spybot r&d, adaware se.  The others seem to get along and didn't read any warning about it till AFTER i restarted and came to the forums  .  I am feeling a bit stupid .....  I am using my son's computer to post this.

Any advice?

[Lisandro]

Are you using a USB keyboard? Maybe you need to activate the USB support on the BIOS to click ESC.
About the time, well, 9 hours for boot time scanning is really too much, but depends on how many archive files do you have, etc.

I do not have NAV but do have mcafee, defender, spyblaster, spybot r&d, adaware se.

McAfee: the firewall, the suite, the antivirus... which one?

[vojtech]

The dots should appear only a few seconds during initialization. It seems that it hung when initializing Windows registry but it's hard to say why. The escape key does not work in this early stage. Try to switch the computer off and start again. if the boot time scan starts and hangs again, you would need to restart, press F8 during boot and select the Last known good configuration from the boot menu.