Avast Chrome extensions added automatically on Chrome reinstall!?

[asparagus]

Hi folks, I have been trying to diagnose and fix a poorly-performing Lenovo laptop. The symptoms (temporary hang-ups and freezes, intermittent severe keyboard buffer latency etc) seem to be confined to browser use (although that's what the machine is mostly used for anyway, so we can't be sure about that). Anyway, yesterday I uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome to see if a corrupted Chrome profile might be the issue. When the re-install finished, I discovered that three Chrome extensions had been added, not at my request, and needed my thumbs up or thumbs down to be installed. Two of them were Avast extensions. I rejected both of them, and now that Chrome no longer retains a record of disabled extensions, I am unable to say exactly what they were called. The laptop no longer has Avast installed - we switched to BitDefender last year - so the only way I can explain Avast browser extensions being pushed without being requested is that Avast still retains some sort of presence on the laptop, and if that is the case, I can see how it might be conflicting with BitDefender and causing the performance problems we are seeing. Please can someone explain whether we have residual Avast clean-up to carry out on this machine, and if so, how? Thanks in advance! Andy

[rocksteady]

When you removed Avast, did you use the avastclear.exe removal tool to remove it properly before installing another AV product?

[asparagus]

Hi Rocksteady, Honestly, I can't remember. But I would expect so. I used Avast for a long time and I was aware there was such a tool. Any reason why I could not download it and run it now, retrospectively?

[asparagus]

So I checked the machine and found a copy of AvastClear in the Downloads folder. Then I searched the whole C drive for files and folders with avast in the name. That found quite a few things, mostly manifest files, but no installation folder or files. I also searched the registry and found a bunch of keys and values. So it was starting to look like I had run avastclear and it had not done its job properly. Then I ran it and repeated the searches, with the same results as the first time. So, yes, I had run avastclear before installing BitDefender. It clearly didn't do a great job at cleaning up afterwards. My question now is, does any of this residual stuff matter? And particularly, could any of it be conflicting with BitDefdender?

[bob3160]

Maybe you just downloaded the Avastclear program but didn't run it?
Since it's still in your Downloads folder, why not run it and see if it cleans up any of that
leftover stuff. It certainly can't hurt anything doing so.
I do know that it does not clean up everything but, what's left behind doesn't interfere
with any other AV's installation or operation.