From time to time, the Avast services have not started.
I tried repair, uninstall, reinstall, downgrade, etc.
Nothing seemed to matter - maybe once every 3 reboots, the avast services would not start properly. Manually restarting the service would work for that session.
While I was tracking down another problem, I disabled many startup options. Then I noticed Avast was starting up properly - every single time.
When I enabled the startup for Soundman.exe - Realtek AC97 driver / sound effects manager, the problems with avast came back.
Could Soundman be causing a problem? Is there a way to alter the order a service loads?
Dig