A little (un)installation dilemma

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hello,
I think I thoroughly messed every useable aspect of a modern PC up. I downloaded a newer version of the Home edition of avast and everything was fine. It’s too long ago to remember wether anything went wrong before restarting the PC but I do know that I had to terminate him by pressing the power off button.

When I restarted the computer the Windows XP bar kept loading and loading (possibly avast doing some updates while the system was starting up) and I was stupid enough to panic and restart :-[…
The next time my PC started up just fine; I logged in and all programs related to avast! (all IMs, P2P programs, browser EVEN Java and Flash players) failed to start, more specifically:

-IMs: Yahoo, ICQ, MSN Live (The old rotten MSN does work), and the SkypePM.exe part of Skype
-P2P: LimeWire
-Browsers: IE (Flash scripts and java scripts fail to work), Mozilla FireFox
-Other: Microsoft Paint (??), Microsoft Outlook, possibly others

All of them give pretty understandable errors about failing to read or write from some memory.
Reinstalling any of them did not work, only Firefox managed to get started.
I redownloaded avast! but I had to remove previous installations before continuing. I removed avast in Windows Safe Mode with AswClear.exe and I clicked OK to remove other parts after rebooting;
I installed avast but I completely forgot it would remove parts at the next startup… Result: It deleted the newly installed parts.

Appearantly avast uses plugins (my guess) to control other programs, because of the distorted installations they must’ve gone corrupt and because of the mess I made I can’t successfully install avast… Like that wasn’t enough the self extractor avast uses is broken too, so any newly downloaded setups fail to extract themselves

I know this might be a bit hard to follow but what I’m asking is either:

  • A way to manage all plug-ins trough possibly a tool distributed by Windows, if that exists
  • A way to reinstall the self extractor avast uses in order to succesfully install avast again and see what it does
  • An archangel to save me out of this mess and make my computer useable again.

The goal of a PC moved from administration to communication and avast! protects and controls ofcourse all possible way to communicate … messing up avast messes up communication :confused:

I hope I made any sense, I’ll be around to answer any inquiries about my inquiry

I’m desperate for help!
The Bugged One :wink:

2

I can’t offer specific help for the three questions, but did you try running the Avast uninstall utility again, and wait for it to reboot before installing again from scratch?

3

I tried and it said that the self protection module is enabled but avast isn’t even running (I doubt if it’s installed, it’s probably semi-installed ???).

4

Reboot into safe mode and run Aswclear from safe, then reboot into normal, all should be good to reinstall.

5

I did that, and I think it is completely gone now, but the plugins that cause my programs to crash aren’t, and the setup for avast can’t self extract so I don’t have a setup to install :open_mouth: AND avast doesn’t have a setup without this self extracting thing

Edit:

When I run the setup downloaded from the official site:

"Setup Selfextract

An error 3 (00000003) has occured.
Last performed operation was:
spawning"

Edit 2:

Oh jeeze, I’m so embarassed now; I did remove the oldest installation of Avast but I forgot to remove the one I installed on another location. I’m going to try to run the setup now, fingers crossed!

Edit 3 (just 4 seconds later):

The setup actually started! Most of the problems with avast are solved with just removing it no? Must be annoying to write the same thing over and over again to everybody haha :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit 4 (1 installation and restart later):
I’ve never been happier to see those 2 little icons in my trays :). I’m now going to reinstall the malfunctioning programs and see if they finally work

6

Searching the forum returns a couple of results with this error. The likely problem is a corrupt download, it seems. A new download seems to fix the problem. Try that, save it somewhere, delete the old one.
Try completely removing any remaiing Avast/Alwil folders (program files, and documents and settings) and run Aswclear.exe again (you shouldn’t have to go into safe mode for that, but do so if needed.)
Then try installing again from the new installer.

7

“Unhandled exception at 0x747c0270 in msnmsgr.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.”

I reinstalled MSN Live, I removed it like they described on the Windows support pages but yet none of the programs related to avast want to work.

8

I’ve turned on and off the IM Shield but nothing helps, still the same “Unhandled exception at 0x747c0270 in msnmsgr.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000.”. Is there any way I could talk to a developer that might be able to look up if that instruction could be place there by ‘avast-like’ operations?

I suspect Avast from causing this because:
When I start the avast! Antivirus console the startup-memory test clearly checks the memory of all failing programs and it takes slightly longer for the malfunctioning ones then for others…

9

have you tried downloading ccleaner and fix some registry issues?