This past weekend I updated to the latest ver. of avast (6.0.1289). It's working fine, no problems. Thanks again to the great team at avast!
In reading the forum I noticed there's a newer version of avast's 'stand-alone' anti-rootkit so I downloaded it and ran it (aswMBR ver 0.9.8.986). It didn't find a rootkit, but marked a file in my systems32 directory as being suspicious. The file is: "windows\system32\ntdll.dll"
(NT Layer DLL I think). It's 692K is size and dated 8/10/2004, so I'm pretty sure it's legit. I ran a full scan using avast and no threat was found. Avast used to run a 'rootkit' scan 8 mins after boot, so I'm sure it should have said something in the prior days if there was something suspicious. Yes? No? The PC has been rebooted several times since the upgrading to 1289.
BTW, I know I'm still on WinXP; SP-2. I can't install SP-3 due to two KBs that are included.
Thanks.