My apologies for leaving out “the details” …

I am running WinXP SP2, and I am using thunderbird v0.8 (milestone) as my email client.

When I had originally installed avast home, I had used the mail config wizard, however, recently I decided to reinstall my XP, and, knowing how it worked, I just did it manually. Though I am certain that I had later rerun the mail config wizard to automatically protect all new accounts (I don’t know how well that integrates with tbird). But I do recall from way back that when I ran the mail config wizard it found my tbird settings.