avast causing pc to freeze

[Dell User]

OK, this is not mine, and can only relay what I know. A friend (out of town) downloaded Avast, but I think she forgot to uninstalled her old antivirus. So it froze up... finally got it to run in safe mode, and tried to uninstall both. The old one uninstalled, but Avast would not.
She ran an uninstaller to try that, and still would not... pc continues to freeze up.
Everytime she does anything with Avast, it freezes. She has Vista, which I don't think is a problem, but her computer is kinda useless at the moment.
She tried to reinstall it, and I think she did, but still after a few minutes, it locks up.
I'm thinking since there was another antivirus, it may have corrupted the download....maybe...
She really needs to remove it, but can't.
Any help... need more info?
Thanks..
OK, just remembered, I think it still freezes even without running Avast, maybe it's trying to update or something and makes it freeze.

[DavidR]

Download the avast! Uninstall Utility, find it here and save it to your HDD.

• 1. Now uninstall (using add remove programs, if you can't do that start from the next step), reboot.
• 2. run the avast! Uninstall Utility, reboot.  If step 1 failed it may be necessary to run this from safe mode, once complete reboot into normal mode.
• 3. install the latest version, reboot.

The key point is knowing what the other AV was as some (notably Norton) can be a real pig to remove causing all sorts of problems when installing other security applications.

So if you can let us know what the other AV was then we may have a link to an uninstall tool for that.

Hopefully someone else can pick this up as I'm calling it a nigh, 2:10 a.m. here.

[Dell User]

Update... she got the pc to not freeze, as long as she does not use avast. She has tried the uninstaller, but it freezes when doing it.
Anything it seems, when avast is used, will cause it to freeze.

[DavidR]

You have to find out what the other AV was without that we can't begin to help removing it and that would cause a clash between the two.

I would say that she isn't running the avast uninstall utility from safe mode as avast doesn't run in safe mode.