After sleeping on this problem I decided to do some tests with both the XP and Win7x64 machine that were bricked by Avast last night.
First, I rolled back the XP machine to Avast 6.0, disabled auto sandbox and tried the installation again (as per regular procedure, not following the above steps) and as it turns out the installation worked this time. So, the masochist that I am, I rolled the system back, left auto sandbox enabled, installed and the system bricked (when logging in). I rolled back again and tried with auto sandbox disabled and the installation worked, however, I tried a 5th time and this time it worked even though auto-sandbox was left enabled! It makes not a whole lot of sense to me.
So as mentioned above I have tried this now 5 times on the same XP machine, and 2x it has bricked the system, and 3x it has worked OK. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, or at least none that is making itself obvious. I don’t really have time to try to figure out the exact cause of the issue, but I am glad for now on that machine I have a working v7.0 and I do not have to resort to the full un-install and safe mode clean.
Moving on to the Windows 7 x64 system, I also rolled that back and tried the update again. This time it appeared to work (I was able to log in), but a couple of minutes when I opened the Avast UI, Avast froze followed by the entire system. So I rolled the system back and tried a third time (again deliberately not following the steps above) and again the install appeared to work OK, I was able to log in, but when I opened the Avast UI it froze up. This 3rd time, however, I had taskmgr open and noticed that there is basically zero CPU activity during the freeze. I then tried to kill the AvastUI.exe process and taskmgr itself locked up followed by the rest of the system. Whatever is happening cannot be good!
After 3 attempts I still could not get this working on Win7x64, so then followed the steps provided above. First, I rolled back the machine to Avast 6.0, I uninstalled Avast 6.0 (using Control Panel) then ran the uninstall utility for 6.0 in safe mode (no point in 7.0 since I haven’t yet installed it at this point). I then installed 7.0 using the full install after rebooting from safe mode. This seemed to work, however, the down side is that I had to re-register Avast and re-do all the associated settings, but it did work. This would suggest that there is some random, strange potential conflict that can happen when installing Avast 7.0 over the top of 6.0. At this point I really do not have time to investigate any further, but I appreciate the replies and suggestions. People talk about the “proper” way to install Avast, but really 99.9% of people are not going to follow that process; they are going to follow the workflow that the software itself presents. Maybe the fact that a “clean” install works will give the Avast developers some clue as to the potential conflict between 6.0 and 7.0.
Anyway, I now have, at least, a way to get around the problem if it comes back on any other systems in future.
Cheers.
