Not that I'm blaming Avast, I clearly did something stupid here, but, I'm afraid I might make things worse if I don't ask for guidance... I run windows xp pro BTW. Let me describe the problem(s) from the beginning. I have several accounts and I noticed this passed week that sometimes, when I started windows, I was unable to login into my account, because the password window just wouldn't come up. I thought "oh oh, virus/malware trouble???" Until then, I was running the free version of AVG, so I decided to get serious, and get avast pro. Unfortunately I made two mistakes: 1) during the installation process, I clicked the license file; realising my mistake, I cancelled the installation, and started over. 2) I did not uninstall AVG before installing avast.
Now even when I can login, well first my computer looks busy starting up, with the sand-timer thingie showing up, but it never gets to the stage where any icon shows up at the bottom right of my screen near the time (sorry for my lack of technical terms, I can't remember what that bar is called). Then whenever I try doing anything, my computer just hangs. Once I succeeded in checking what processes were running, and there didn't seem to be anything running, not even avast (ok so some small numbers would flicker on near different things every so often, too fast for me to read, and then go back to 0). And then it froze anyway (I'm using another computer right now). I'm tempted to try and uninstall both avg and avast (although I'm not sure how to do so safely), maybe run a registry clean up thing, and install avast again afterwards... but, since it has become abundantly clear that I am clueless what I'm doing, I thought I'd better stop and ask for advice... what should I try to do?
Thank you so much for your help.