avast!: Forced to Close Periodically to Regain Access to Internet

[info]

After every few hours (of fairly heavy interenet use visiting many different news sites, little video), Firefox 2.x and 3.x suddenly fail to connect to the internet.  Internet Explorer also, cannot connect.  Closing avast! and reopening it again, solves the problem (for both FF and IE) and I am again able to surf for several hours whereupon the problem reoccurs.  Lately, I am just stopping and starting avast! on-access protection from the icon after a couple of hours, which seems to be working but is becoming tedious.  I am on 32bit Windows Vista Home Premium SP1, Firefox 3 (now, but it was happening in 2.0.0.5 as well), and avast! free version 4.8 build 4.8.1201.  My machine is new and this began after installing avast!.  I really appreciate this company and it's software and will struggle to keep it on my system.  However, I haven't been successful in searching out a similar occurrence.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this behavior?   Is there something I can do to narrow in on the problem?  While I have been using the program for years now, I am still quite the newbie at it.  Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

[wyrmrider]

hopefully someone else will pick this up
a couple of curiosities
Did your new machine come pre-configured with a security suite or another AV?
have you right clicked to see which providers were provided and running when this happens?
I'm thinking that some logging will be asked to be turned on and a log posted
at least check and see what other programs are running and try and spot any that might clobber your AV
obviously THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN (but it does sometimes)
I'm really glad that you can get Avast back up quickly

are you running any anti-spyware?
what firewall? (any changers here?)

[info]

Thanks.  I am running the following providers (default):
Internet Mail
Internet Messaging
Network Shield
P2P Shield
Standard Shield
Web Shield

The machine came with Norton Internet Security which I disabled using MSCONFIG (two entries), but I am uncertain if I have gotten rid of all of it.  The Windows Vista Security Center shows only avast! running under Malware.  I am also running Zone Alarm, and Spybot S&D.  ZoneAlarm is shown in the Security Center under Firewall (nothing else). I had suspected Spybot and tested without loading it but got the same result.  When I discovered that I could reconnect by stopping avast!, I was running only Zone Alarm and avast! (of the three programs). I stopped Zone Alarm to no avail, and then, when I stopped avast!, I was able to reestablish the connection.  Subsequently, after running into the problem, I was able to reconnect by the method described above (disabling and re-enabling avast!) with both Zone Alarm and Spybot S&D running alongside avast!.

hopefully someone else will pick this up
a couple of curiosities
Did your new machine come pre-configured with a security suite or another AV?
have you right clicked to see which providers were provided and running when this happens?
I'm thinking that some logging will be asked to be turned on and a log posted
at least check and see what other programs are running and try and spot any that might clobber your AV
obviously THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN (but it does sometimes)
I'm really glad that you can get Avast back up quickly

are you running any anti-spyware?
what firewall? (any changers here?)

[DavidR]

I posted in your other topic as I believe that your problems stem from not having fully uninstalled Norton, the actions you took are insufficient to remove it.

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=37024.msg310400#msg310400