Thanks. Maybe the hard drive is going bad and avast pushes it over the edge (a lot of hand waving here). It is at 128M maybe I should bring that up to 192M or 256M. Is there an HD error reporter that runs on W98?
In any case I have installed avast 4.8, run a scan with it (which completed in a reasonable time), registered avast 4.8 and uninstalled ClamWin.
I have tried Linux more than a couple of times, but it is like fat free potato chips - not very satisfying. I may try that using an old version of Linux that I have laying around. The newer ones seem to be as bloated as Windows.
