I’m helping a friend with a Windows 7 laptop (HP Pavillion). He ran into some problems; I don’t know everything he tried, but at some point he was trying to run system restore and it said he needed to shut down the anti-virus (Avast). But when he tried to start the Avast controls he got errors.
They include “Unable to start file system shield. Shield unreachable.”
“Current status: unsecured… use the fix now button.”
The “fix now” button does nothing… just no response.
“Urgent: avast service is stopped. The avast anti-virus program has been stopped, or is an inconsistent state. Please restart.”
Button to restart the avast service: first gives UAC for permission, you hit yes, and then nothing further happens.
When I got there to help him, I showed him that we could do a system restore in safe mode. I thought this was going to work–we restored back to a date two months before all the trouble started. But Avast is behaving in exactly the same way!