Hello again.
I'm a pretty dumb guy. I'm trying to reply to David who was answering my question of a couple of days back but can't seem to figure how to reply to him directly or at least directly to his response. He had said that with the home version of Zone Alarm I should not have been asked all those questions about changing "transparent proxy mode of the web shield" when I installed Avast. He asked, as well, what version of Avast I have downloaded. It's 4.7. I hope, David that you see this.
Good news for me is that I have been able to solve my problem, which was primarily that my e-mail had stopped working since I downloaded Avast. Problem was mine. I had gone through several steps to uninstall my old anti-virus program, AVG, but finally found that much of it was still there. It was quite a coup for a guy like me who has little experience in this area, but I finally found the old AVG setup and there was an uninstall option that really worked. Once I did that, no more problems.
Actually I'd like to blame the computer tech at where I work. He was the one who recommended Avast. I realized my computer had become a Zombie and AVG was not solving the problem; it kept saying my computer was virus free. He told me that Avast would do a "boot check" and that's where the Trojan would likely be. Well, that's where I found it. So, thanks to Avast. He did say though not to bother unistalling AVG until I had already installed Avast. I suspect that may have led to the problem.
That brings me to one more question. When I downloaded Avast I was given that option of words to the effect: "Do you want a boot time scan?" on my tech friend's instructions I clicked "yes" and got that. There was my computer, in what I took to be pre-Windows-installed DOS[?] font, scanning away. And this is where the Trojan was revealed. Problem is, now that I have Avast installed I can't see where I'd have the option to do that again. If that tech guy was right the ability to do this kind of scan is a great asset of Avast.
Canada John