As I said above, I downloaded a fresh copy of the Home Free edition earlier today.
With avast installed, when I boot the laptop, several windows pop up saying the various programs have stopped working and when I uninstaled Avast, the problem disappeared.
I have several spyware programs installed such as Spywareguard, Spywareblaster, Spywareterminator and Threatfire.
I should also mention that I've had Avast 5 running on the Laptop for several months until an Avast update was done a few nights ago which is when this problem first appeared.
Perhaps there's a bug in a recent Avast update file !