Okay it was that the Avast icon was not in my system tray. I then went to Start: all Programs and tried to start Avast there. That is when I got the Group Policy type of error saying I didn’t have permission to start Avast.

I uninstalled avast from control panel then used avastclear in safe mode, booted to normal and used Rejzors uninstall. I have done this a few times now.

I had zonealarm and spybot s&d wen this all first happened. I now have malwarebytes installed and have just run a scan which showed as clear.