I sat and waited for several minutes where as usually it comes up right away, after about ten minutes it never showed up, I was unable to shut down in anyway, when I picked a choice nothing would happen and trying to run anything would prompt that windows is shutting down but it never did and I had to cut power to my computer.
I’ve not been able to replicate this after many restarts, I have the software updater, browser protection and browser clean up uninstalled now if that makes any difference. It’s a very worrisome problem and I was wondering if anyone knows what caused this as I have not been able to replicate it.
Once, I had this issue, too.
It happened not only with the Avast icon, but randomly with several other tray icons as well.
The problem is the shell32.dll, which will give XP only an unsufficient time to load the tray icons while booting XP.
So, especially if you have lots of those icons (let’s say, something above 20), some of them might be missing in the end.
There’s a patched shell32.dll available on the internet, which will increase the available loading time for those icons.
You will also need this Replacer tool to perform the replacement.
Make sure to download the stable version, not the pre-release of that tool.
Maybe you would like to try this dll?
Don’t forget to backup your original shell32.dll first, or even better,
just create an image by means of some imaging tool (like for example Paragon Backup & Recovery free).
In case, you don’t know, what an image is in this context,
it’s a copy of your entire XP partition, including XP, all of your software and all of your settings.
To recover this image you will have to use a boot CD.
This CD has to be created during the installation of the imaging tool.
I have used Xp for many years, and have only once had this well described problem with the tray icons ,although I have a huge amount of icons. It was caused by Comodo defence+.
I am telling this because I never have had any reason to patch the shell32.dll, although I naturally would do it if necessary.
What madmax25 said. I had a similar problem, 2 versions ago, with my older xp machine. Personally I just let it go as I prefer an icon on my desktop than my tray.
Let me add, what I said about the image is possible for different Windows versions, too, of course.
Anyway, I guess, I confused what happened on my machine with what EmoHobo told us here on top of this thread.
Btw., as for now, I don’t think I will install Avast 8 in the present state on my machine.
There are too much negative posts about it right now.
I’m going to wait for the bugs to be fixed first.