ashserv.exe causes hang at shutdown during restart in Win98

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I’m running Win98SE and installed avast! for the first time on June 20th. The version is 4.6.665 and I got help here from ssed in getting my Web Shield to work.

I have just noticed a problem that I don’t believe existed right after installing avast!, but which has manifested sometime just during the past couple of days. The problem is this:

When I restart my computer through Start>Shut down>Restart, the computer hangs during the shutdown phase showing the Windows 98 logo screen that says something like “The Computer (or Windows, I forget which) is shutting down . . .” Then I have to hit the reset button to get it to move on and reboot.

Noticing the 3 avast! startup items (ashmaisv.exe, ashwebsv.exe, and ashserv.exe), I learned by a process of elimination that it was ashsev.exe that was causing this problem.

It, however, causes no problems at all when I shut down my system (as opposed to restarting it), which is the subject of another thread in this forum.

Are there any solutions to this hang-at-shutdown-during-restart problem?

2

Does it help when you change the storage method from ODBC to XML, e.g. as suggested here?

3

It seems to be happening regardless of that setting, Igor.

4

The only thing that seems to always eliminate the problem is by removing ashserv.exe from my startup items.

5

Oh, no. Wrong again. It just happened for the first time with even ashserv.exe turned off, which suggests the problem is something else altogether. I just can’t think of anything else I’ve done that could account for it during the past couple of days, though . . .

6

Well, I right-clicked the Avast! tray icon and turned off all its processes, then restarted the computer without it hanging on the “Windows is shutting down” screen. So, I then went ahead and completely uninstalled Avast!, and have now restarted the computer 5 or 6 times since then without any further problems at all.