Has anyone had this happen before…
I right click on the avast icon in the system tray by the clock… I click “Start Avast Antivirus”…Avast splash pops up scanning memory…at the end of the startup memory scan… It just disappears. The program doesn’t come up. This happens every once in awhile for me. Mostly if I’m doing something else…like reading a site in a browser.
Windows XP SP-2
AMD Athlon XP 1800+
512MB DDR-RAM
What will happen if you run the Simple User Interface directly from your avast folder? (ashSimpl.exe)
Well, it comes up then. But you see…I can’t consistently reproduce the strange behavior. So I will have to try that over the course of a week to see if it happens from running ashSimpl.exe directly. When it DOES happen the windowing system starts acting funny. Menu items ghosting… etc… Like even after I’ve clicked on a menu item… a faint image of it will persist over top of everything else on the screen. The only way to get rid of these persistent images is to change the resolution of the monitor then change it back…or just restart the system. After that happens with avast right click menus take a lot of time to come up…
I have an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 7500 card if that that helps. 
Well, I won’t worry too much.
Seems to be a hot day (poor cooling on the system), stressed CPU, etc. etc.
I have this in the past too, now very few occurences… but, don’t worry: you can’t reproduce it because it’s not a deterministic problem, you can’t ‘solve’ it.
Boot, boot… the drug of the drugs 8)
Could be a driver issue also. Make sure you have the latest drivers installed for video, sound, nic, motherboard etc etc.
Haven’t noticed any driver issues. I have the latest drivers for my card. My cpu’s temp never gets over 60c. I don’t really worry about it too much. Was just a curiousity. Thanks for the input guys.