Hi,
ok, that's what I did:
Using the update service I updated the system yesterday.
This morning I tried to start my system and what happend was: I got the normal blue start screen where NT normally shows the dots for the devices. I never saw the dots, but my system went directly to BIOS start screen.
After reading the forum, I exchanged the aswtdi.sys. This helped so far, that I saw the dots, the logon screen appeared and I could logon to the system. However, all my programs in autostart an from the run-HKEY never showed up. Instead I got the hourglass and the system seemed to lock-up.
I then stopped the avast service and renamed the asw* files in winnt/system32/drivers.
After that I could start and use my system normally. Of course avast was not running.
After that I started the update service manually and run Program-Update. What I think happend was that the update service realized that I had downloaded the update recently and reinstalled the previously renamed asw* files. I rebooted and the same thing (no dots, reboot from bios) happened. I checked again and saw that the update service had reinstalled the renamed files, and of course the old aswtdi.sys file as well.
Do you want me to do something else? Just let me know
Reiner