I’ve been running Avast for many years with no problems, until today. My computer (XP sp3, 512m, AMD Athlon) was painfully slow starting up, and the task bar was empty (it’s usually full of all my toys). After several reboots, etc., the Avast icon finally showed up, with an *asterisk. EVERYTHING was turned off. I tried re-enabling, system scan, sys scan @ boot, restarting, etc. No joy. It said something about it couldn’t find the end (I wish I would have written it down, but when MY computer is broke, I lose about 100 IQ points.) I downloaded a fresh version, and chose “remove”. I thought this was necessary to reinstall the same version. In hindsight, if it had been altered by malware, this may have been good.
Anyway…
I went looking for the new file I’d just downloaded. It was no longer there. So I used my original ver 5 installation file. It appears to be back to normal. I’ll keep an eye on it for a few days and report anything suspicious.
-Mike Curtis