Avast notified me of update on 1/18/11. I let it update to 5.1.889 and let it restart. After that, my
computer wouldn't boot up anymore! It starts giving errors and
won't display desktop icons, start menu, NOTHING! The only thing I could do was to kill the computer with the switch, boot up in SAFE mode and uninstall Avast. Then, I'm fine again. (XP Home with Avast and Comodo, no other antivirus anything.)
I used aswclear5.exe to do uninstall. First tried going back to version 5.1.86, but had same problem of computer not booting. So,
went back to version 5.0.667 and computer boots fine and everything works again.
I see many posts related to similar problems with v5.1.889. For those of you that experience this, I recommend you go back to v5.0.667. Get old Avast here:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_avast_antivirus/8292/Some errors you might get before boot completely fails:
- "userinit.exe: The application failed to properly initialize. 0xc0000022".
- "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime error! Abnormal program termination."
I see many other posts with people having similar problems with 5.1.889, like these:new avast program update, version number 5.1.889 screwed up my computer http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=69983.0System goes crush when update to 5.1.889 at restartinghttp://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=69951.0windows 7 + avast 5.1.889http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=69746.05.1.889 crashed 2 XP workstations so farhttp://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=69867.0some weird problems with two latest avast! Free Antivirus versionshttp://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=69384.0Seems like most of these people are going back to 5.0.667. Hopefully you'll release a fixed version soon! Otherwise, no choice but to run the old 5.0.667.