Vik
As suggested by Tech, I uninstalled ZA and activated Windows Vista Firewall. This produced an improvement, but it is still much longer than before the last update. Just now I downloaded and installed the new driver provided by Vik. It is a bit better, but still not as before. Here is what I did after installing the new driver. I shut down and re-opened the computer. Here is a timeline of what then happened from the time that I entired my password:
1. Time to open Outlook (it is in my startup folder): 15 sec. - acceptable
2. Time for the Avast icon in the system tray to stop turning: 35 sec.
3. For 1 minute from login, the CPU meter in the gadget sidebar fluctuates wildly between 10 and 100%.
4. For another minute, the CPU meter fluctuates less often, and only up to 50%; then it sits just above 0.
5. Then I opened IE; it took a full 25 seconds for anything to happen, i.e. for the bare window to open, then another 15 seconds to load up my home page. This the most unacceptable performance
6. I then opened Excel and it came on instantly.
7. I finally hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete to access the Task Manager; that took about 15 seconds; I think this is on the slow side.
I hope this data will be helpful to you in resolving the slowness problem that has appeared with the last version of Avast.
