Hi Craig,

Thanks for your quick response.

I tried what you suggested but may have not done everything correctly as odd things happened to my Avast interface afterwards. Firefox did recognize the Avast plugin and seemingly installed it as it reappeared in the Firefox extensions list. However the icon did not reappear on the taskbar and the green ticks did not reappear on the search pages. More worryingly, in Avast ‘Settings’, Avast Account status showed as disconnected and in the ‘Active Protection’ area everything had disappeared.

I tried a repair install but that did not help so I used a recent backup image of my system drive to return to my previous position. Other than the issue with Firefox, Avast is working normally again and has updated correctly.

As the issue with Firefox is a minor irritation, I can live with it for the time being so there is no immediate panic. It is possible that I did not carry out the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ routine entirely correctly so I will explain what I did:
I opened ‘Add or Remove Programs’ items in the Control Panel;
navigated to Avast and clicked the ‘change/remove programs’ button;
clicked the ‘change’ button and then ‘continue’;
on the ‘Which componants do you want to install?’ page, I unticked everything under ‘Shields’, and ‘Language’ and everything bar ‘Browser Protection’ under ‘Tools’ before continuing.
I thought that ‘Browser Protection’ would then be uninstalled so I could do a fresh installation of it. Is this where I went wrong as the installation appeared to go ahead straight away? Had unticking the other boxes caused the loss of the A’ctive Protection’ items?

I would be grateful if you could give a step by step guide to using the ‘Add Remove Programs/Change’ option for Avast as I have appeared to have misconstrued what you meant. Sorry to be a nuisance and a bit dim about this.