Ok, my ball had the red circle on it at start up, this happened a couple times, not always. It would even take my taskbar a little while to appear when it happened. If I would re-start the PC, it would work fine 2nd time around. It was stated in a window ( I think when I went to more info ) that it was an RPC error.
What I had done was: initially installed avast > then realized it had 6 out of 7 providers running, the 7th being outlook, which I have disabled / removed in ADD / Remove componants & services.
I always choose custom installers, and knew I should have unchecked outlook, but didn't...... Then I just removed it with ccleaners uninstaller accually, and re-installed again, this time leaving outlook unchecked. With that being said, I felt it possible / likely that since I didn't use the proper removal procedures, that I had left remnants, as mentioned here, and thus was causing my probs...... I might have another issue going on at start up as well, that has nothing to do with avast, but just wanted to eleminate this as being the prob.
This particular PC is a Compaq, custom build from the HP site 2 years ago: SR1730T I have done a lot of things to / with it in 2 years. It hasn't been factory since it left there. The OS on it now is an original version of XP, pre sp1, but does have sp2 on it now ( just recently ) I ran it with sp1 for a year or so
As you can see, i'm not big on changes / updates. I do keep my security updated, but dont play the micro$oft update game.
One thing I forgot to mention is, I have seen a slower shut down time on all my PCs since switching to avast. I am prob taking this topic / thread in a diff direction with this stuff though, sorry mods....