I’ve been using Avast on an Intel NUC6CAYS running Win 10 Home for a couple of months now. I am on the Fall Creator’s Edition.
Following a reboot this morning the following issues occurred and recurred on at least 4 subsequent reboots.
- Details pane in task manager would sometimes appear the first time I opened task manager, sometimes not. On closing and reopening task manager the list would always be empty.
- Chrome was freezing and becoming unresponsive. “GPU Process” threads getting stuck and could not be killed via task manager with “Access is denied”. Threads not shutting down when Chrome was killed
- After a few minutes task menu would become unresponsive and programs were refusing to open. It wasn’t even possible to bring up the Start menu. Using ctrl-alt-del the computer would get stuck on restarting and had to be powered off. This rendered the PC unusable.
Initially I was troubleshooting Chrome thinking it was causing the problem, so I tried to create a new profile then uninstalled it. This did not resolve the issue.
Knowing that Avast can be quite intrusive, I then rebooted and removed Avast through Add/Remove programs. I was suspicious of A/V software due to the inability to kill threads, but I thought this was a long shot. To my great surprise all of the above issues disappeared once Avast was removed. I was even able to reinstall Chrome and my Task Manager, Start Programs and Task Bar all behave normally even after opening repeatedly.
This is incredibly disappointing. Avast has a few quirks and default options (like appending “Checked by Avast” to pop outgoing mail!) that I loathe but I quite like the control it gives me once set up nicely. But you wasted a good hour and a half of my life this morning and I’m wary of trying to put it back on.
Has anyone else experienced similar lately or am I just lucky?