Avast home 4.8 causes BSOD on Vista Home Premium

[ReflectedLight]

Hi,

I have been using Avast Home Premium 4.8 for the last couple of months and everything has been fine until yesterday. Suddenly I got the BSOD. As my system rebooted, Vista Home Premium claimed that my anitvirus caused the problem. I uninstalled Avast and no BSOD. I removed all the folders and ran Ccleaner. No more BSOD. Tried to reinstall Avast with a fresh install and allowed a boot-scan. When the system rebooted I got BSOD again. The Avast icon was in my system tray, but the program would not run or allow itself to be uninstalled. The boot-scan never took place. I finally managed to use the installer to uninstall Avast. Everytime I install Avast now I get BSOD.

I do not have any other security software or any unusual configuration. Is this a mutant Avast update or Windows update? Has anyone else had this problem?

[igor]

We'd need the corresponding minidump files from Windows/Minidump folder - could you please upload them to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming ?
Thanks.

[ReflectedLight]

The minidump folder was empty...maybe because Vista prompted me to do a restore whenever it would crash. HOWEVER, I do recall a program that was on my wife's desktop two days ago that she said she DID NOT install. It was called Ascentive Performance Center. I thought I deleted all of it. After all of this BSOD I stuck AVG on here temporarily and it flagged a registry key left by this Ascentive Performance Center as dangerous. I didn't pay too attention to it since AVG flags all kinds of files because of false positives, but I removed the entry anyway, ran ccleaner and rebooted. Now I read that this Ascentive thing might be a Trojan or some sort of malware.

[ReflectedLight]

Reinstalled Avast with no problems so far.