I have been using Avast for several months on my computer and my wife's. I am running XP Home edition. Several days ago when my wife started her computer the Avast blue ball shows up in the task bar with a small circle with a red slash through it. It hangs up until the computer is turned off and rebooted. Some times it does not do it the second boot up and some times it takes several tries.
I thought it was perhaps just me experiencing problems for past 2 weeks, but I've been experiencing some issues with both my XP Pro computers hanging/freezing too during startup too. The issue does not happen every time I boot the computer. Both Dells have had Avast installed from new about 9 months ago. No previous antivirus sw installed.
The windows desktop would appear and icons would start appearing in the system tray as normal. But only the Avast icon (no red cross) and the Intel graphics icon would appear. No other icons I normally see would appear. I could not access Task manager nor the Start menu. The mouse pointer could be moved, but eventually it too would freeze. Lately, the laptop started to hang far more frequently on startup so decided I had to fix it once and for all.
Turning the laptop off and back on usually resolved the problem. The Event log was not very helpful.
This has happened many times on the laptop.
Then one morning, my Dell desktop experienced the same symptoms too and this was just too much of a coincidence. (It has only happened once and has not yet been repeated)
I've gone thru my laptop with a fine 'tooth comb' as they say to see what new applications I may have recently installed that may have contributed to this new problem. A few weeks earlier, I had upgraded both computers to IE8, installed OfficeXP, Windows Live Messenger and Mail 2009 and netframework up to v3.5. Used Hijackthis to assess what was running on my laptop etc.
Scanned it for viruses and malware. Performed many restores from older image backups I have made, to try and isolate the problem. I ruled out the above mentioned software I installed recently and eventually I narrowed the problem down to Avast being the only probable cause.
To cut a further long story short, I reluctantly removed Avast Home Free edition from the laptop and installed AntiVir to see if it would resolve the problem. So far, I have not had a repeat of the windows freeze problem in over a week.
I later discovered Avast has Troubleshooting menu features which I could have used to investigate the problem.
I am still running Avast on the Dell desktop but have decided to tick the check box for 'Delay loading of Avast! services after other system services'.
I've used Avast on previous computers since 2004 but this is the first time I've encountered a problem which I believe is down to Avast v4.8.1335
