Hello All,
Since my last post a couple of days ago I have experimented somewhat and would add the following comments in the hope they might help improve the startup situation.
1) It seems to me that there is , not surprisingly, some conflict between applications which want to start at boot time.
In my case they are Avast!, Online Armor, WinPatrol and Sandboxie, although I prefer to have the latter start when needed.
I wasted half a day trying to manage the startup order to no avail since all three (Avast!,OA & WP) insist on stating first and cannot be delayed.
2) Thinking it prudent, after all that mucking about, I completely uninstalled Avast! 4.8, which had been upgraded from 4.7.
I reinstalled 4.8 from the downloaded exe file, and since then the startup situation has settled down and Avast!, OA and WP appear to be cooperating during startup.
I still get
Internal error has occurred in module aswar scan function failed!, function 00000001
each startup.
3) Can it be confirmed that the Avast! rootkit scan on system startup has a 2 min. delay ? (Ref: Vlk elsewhere)
This might explain why sometimes the startup problem heals itself after a short delay.
Hope this helps those still having startup problems
i.e. try a clean reinstall from the exe file.
Maurice