Giraffe, I received this reply from the avast technical support team today. Thought I would pass it along for you to try if you haven’t already:
Hello,
we apologize for technical difficulties with our software.
To repair your avast! Antivirus installation, please follow the steps below:
go to Start > Control Panel > Uninstall or Change a Program ( Programs and features ) > Select Avast Installation > Change → Repair
This should fix the issue, if not please do not hesitate to contact me back.
If after running the repair feature and you’re still having problems I would uninstall it and reload it if you haven’t already tried it. If you still are having problems I would definitely submit a trouble ticket to technical support. They need to know that users are having difficulty with their products.
My Avast Free 2015 running on an HP Pavilion a730n under XPhome SP3 is just nailing the snot outta I/O reads ALL THE TIME when I look at Task Manager. AvastSvc.exe is showing 125,487,000+ and climbing all the time. CPU running between about 65% and 100% constantly. Reboot does not help. Gotta get this fixed as it slows down the machine hugely.
Have the same problem: AvastSvc.exe loads the system at 5 to 40 %. Not that much, far from 100 % anyway, but it does so 24/7 (has system tray icon animated all the time).
Tried to repair as written in reply #20. No effect.
Thanks runningwolf but, like KabirK, it has no effect.
Gone back to 2014 for now - and had to turn off notifications for Updates to programme as the tray icon was showing a fault. I’ll update when I want to!