Avast stopped working

[teh_rick]

Hello.  I signed up here, and I hope I am not posting this in an incorrect area. 

I wanted to ask for help on an issue that happened the moment I turned on my laptop today.  I turned it on and Avast was not working.  I thought it was just an error and I restarted my laptop and it is still not working.  The exact message it says is "The avast! antivirus program has been stopped, or is in an inconsistent state.  Please restart the program to resume protecting your system."  Now there's icon to click that says "start program."  I click that, and nothing happens.  There also is another icon on the top of the program that says "Fix Now" and that does nothing either.

I have the free avast ver 5.0.462, and have been using this program since February.  And it was working yesterday, so really don't know what happened to suddenly change it. 

[Pondus]

Try repair and reboot

For a repair of avast. Windows, Add Remove programs, select 'avast! Anti-Virus,' click the Change/Remove button from the pop-up window, scroll down to Repair, click next and follow.

[teh_rick]

I followed what you said, and the result was "The producted was updated sucessfully."  I went to start up avast again and it was still not working.  I tried it again, and did a reset would help it, but it's still the same.

[Angellynn]

I am having the same problem as Rick, but when I go to update it says " There was a error while changing the product configuration." and when I try to repair it it says "Error processing packages Please use full update." I had even tried to update and repair it while I was in safe mode but it still said the same thing. I have the Avast 5.0 with license key. When I try and turn avast on it says "Unable to start file systems shields, shield unreachable." I dont know what else to do, any info would be great. I would hate to uninstall it and not be able to use it after I had paid for it.


Thanks in advance.

[Pondus]

did you have any antivirus program before you installed avast ?
have you removed it using ad/remove program ?
have you run a uninstall tool for that program to remove all leftovers ?
you can fiend uninstallers here http://uninstallers.blogspot.com/

[teh_rick]

I'm thinking of uninstalling avast then reinstalling it.  My question is will i have to re-register with a new e-mail address?  Or can i use the one i used for this avast already?

[jadinolf]

Rick, you will have to re-register but you can use the same email address.

[teh_rick]

I also wanted to mention that I use process explorer on my laptop to see what programs my computer runs.  Before this morning I always saw AvastSvc.exe running, but when i ran my laptop earlier, that wasn't running.  Only the Avast UI worked and not the other.  I did an uninstall and reinstalled it a while ago, and it works fine.  I even did a restart to see if it would not work again, but it still does.  I find it odd, but the issue is resolved.  Thank you all

[jadinolf]

Great news, Rick.

One problem solved.