Booted into safe mode, the same crashes occur when scanning with avast.
I think the problem is not on avast, not only, we need to solve other thing that is crashing the computer :'(
I'm not quite sure what registry entry is for startup
I was talking about avast4.ini file and not the Windows Registry. Did I misunderstand you?
I've tried the avast cleaner but it hasn't found anything, though it did say a couple of dat files couldn't be scanned, there is also a picsgore.dat which I can delete but comes back when you restart.
I've never heard about that file but could be normal that dat files are blocked by the system and cannot be scanned by avast
I've also tried the kaspersky based one but that also didn't find anything other than a few registry entries it thought were wrong, I think from previous viruses. There is nothing special in the properties for picsgore.dll btw.
Do you mean on-line scanning I suppose?
Do you install Kaspersky?
I get the feeling that this may need to be sorted at boot time but the schedule boottime scan option in avast is greyed out, is this something only in the professional edition? If so is there anything simple but effective I could get for scanning at boot time, an exe I can just add at the top of autoexec.bat or something? I mean I could start up and go to the command line so windows is never in the equation but maybe deleting picsgore.dll will not get everything and it'll keep re-appearing just like the dat file.
Boot time scanning is a Windows 2k/XP feature. Home and Professional version of avast have it, it's an OS problem not avast. You can't make an autoexec.bat or link for it. You can edit the Windows Registry but I'm afraid this won't be the best moment for that. If you want, I can guide you...
About memory scanning, you can try:
"C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast\ashQuick.exe" "*MEMORY"The *MEMORY parameter causes avast! to scan the operating memory of the computer: the true virtual memory.
"C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast\ashQuick.exe" "*STRT-MEM-SHORT"The *STRT-MEM-SHORT scans (besides the startup items) the modules loaded in memory: the corresponding files, not the real memory.
While the *MEMORY parameter may catch unknown (packed) variants of viruses that may not be detected on disk (they can be found since the packed file is already unpacked to memory), it may also fail to detect the viruses for which only a packed variant exists (and the VPS does not contain a signature for the unpacked code). Generally, avast! virus database is optimized (and checked) for the file detection - the
memory scan is rather a special additional feature.
"C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast\ashQuick.exe" "*STARTUP"The *STARTUP parameter will scan all startup user accounts items.
"C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast\ashQuick.exe" "*STARTUP-SHORT"The *STARTUP parameter will scan the current user startup items.
So, if you want a real thorough check of the memory/ startup, I'd rather recommend using both the parameters *STRT-MEM-SHORT and *MEMORY together (or, *MEMORY, *MEMORY-SHORT and *STARTUP for all the user accounts).
Like this:
"C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast\ashQuick.exe" "*MEMORY" "*STRT-MEM-SHORT" "*STARTUP" "*STARTUP-SHORT"