Hello. I’m using Avast 4.5 home Edition. Recently I have noticed that that the Avast icon is not showing in the windows taskbar. It once did, but alas, does not appear anymore. What is happening?
Did you happen to run a program called Spysweeper recently?
–lee
Please use the search option on this board. A lot of threads about this subject already.
Many with (possible) solutions.
Ah, yes…
Ah, yes....
OK, recently there was a false positive with the Spysweeper definitions which picked up a part of avast as spyware/adware (a mistake), and when removing this false positive (was picked up as lopdotcom) it effectively disabled avast, the only way i can see to solve this problem is to uninstall avast, reboot, reinstall avast, reboot.
You can see more info here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=10569
–lee
Well, I wouldn’t say it “effectively disabled avast!” - the avast! service was still running, so the resident protection should still be active - “only” the windows are not visible.
To fix the problem, just add the path to ashDisp.exe into
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
(as the value named avast!).
Thanks. I sorted it by turning Spysweeper of while reinstalling avast. Still, that doesn’t help the fact that I do acctually have the lop.com spyware on my pc sigh 
Get the latest signature file for spy sweeper as the false positive which disables the avast icon has been resolved. So any report of lopdotcom should be ok, but check the path first (avast hasn’t any spyware).