Avast slowing start of IE8 on Windows XP system

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi,

My system is an XP Pro SP3 desktop. Since installing Avast 2014.9.0.2006, Internet Explorer 8 has been very slow to load (2 minutes or more). The problem is with the loading of the home page as everything is normal until that point. IE8 is not my default browser, I use Firefox 24 for my normal internet activity and it has no loading problem. I only use IE8 for Microsoft security updates as I have chosen to use manual updating rather than relying on a problematical Windows Automatic Update service.

Disabling the ‘AVAST Software a.s.’ add-on in IE8 solves the problem of lengthy loading time - this leads me to ask the following:
i) Given my limited use of IE8, is it risky to have disabled the ‘AVAST Software a.s.’ add-on which, incidently, appears twice in the add-ons list (disabling one also automatically disables the other occurrence)?
ii) Why does the Avast add-on slow IE8’s loading but the similar extension for Firefox has negligible effect on load time?

Thanks.

2

Apologies to regulars for missing the fact that this issue has been raised in other threads. My IE8 is running perfectly normally with the ‘AVAST Software a.s.’ disabled. It is reassuring to see that the issue is commonplace and that I do not have a problem on my system that caused the slowness.

Meanwhile I await patiently for a fix from Avast.

3

This is to confirm that, having re-enabled the ‘Avast Software a.s.’ plugin in Internet Explorer 8, the browser is working normally once more. Presumably a fix has been included in a recent Avast update.