After adding a new MS "Wheel mouse Optical 1.1a" to my system along with Intellipoint drivers I rebooted. As the system booted up I noticed it was taking longer than usual and the hard drive really seemed to be working harder than it should have. Oddly enough my first reaction was to check for excessive fragmentation using PerfectDisk 11. I attempted to start PD11, and the grinding from the hard drive started again, and then entire system became sluggish and less responsive. A good 5 minutes or more later, PD11 finally started up, but responsiveness still seemed a bit off.
I've been sitting here uninstalling the intellipoint software and trying the system without it..removing and reinstalling PD11, reinstalling the intellipoint drivers...nothing seeming to help the problem. Then, I'm not sure why, I decided to disable Avast shields and see what happens. BOOM, PD11 pops right up in no time. No horrible strained grinding from the hard drive, no delay.
So the mouse and it's drivers had nothing to do with the scenario, they just happened to be things that I knew for sure changed just before I noticed the drastic performance drop. What I think happened is the system had updated to the latest Avast program version, but had not yet been restarted until after adding the mouse. With the latest Avast now loaded, startup was slow because PD11 loads its services and agents and what not at boot time.
Having found the apparent conflict (between Avast and PD11), I did a google search and found this forum that seems to confirm my suspicion that Avast and PD11 are not longer playing nicely together. I thought I should comment since it seems that people are still trying to narrow it down to what versions and what OS this is an issue on.
Windows XP Pro 32 bit, SP3 (Up to date)
Perfect Disk 11 (build 185)
Avast Free AV 6.0.1203 (Definitions 110809-1)
If forced to make a choice between the two at this point, naturally I'd be more concerned about malware infections than fragmentation. On the other hand, if the AV software is going to render my system slow, unresponsive, and unreliable under certain conditions, the extent of which is still unknown, then the AV software is causing just about as much grief as as some malware might.
I think my solution is going to be to keep Avast disabled until a new program version is released. I might even revert back to AVG in the meantime so I don't feel totally unprotected. I'm a big Avast fan and not so much an AVG fan as of late, so I really hope that this problem gets the attention is deserves so I and many others can get back to using it along with whatever other software they might like to use.
