Black screen on boot being caused by Avast?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I have a Win XP SP2 machine which started with the following behaviour, I believe after doing an automatic upgrade of Avast to version 5.0.677:

Just before getting to Windows welcome screen, goes to black screen with mouse pointer. Pointer can be moved by mouse but PC is otherwise unresponsive and has to be reset.
It doesn’t always do this, maybe 1 in 5 times, but when it does it usually does it twice in succession, then boots properly at the 3rd attempt.

I switched on boot logging and I have found by comparing records for good and bad boots in ntbtlog.txt that the system is crashing at the file aswFsBlk.sys.

A similar situation is reported here:
https://support.avast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=229&nav=0,62
but I have never had this Asus software installed.

Any ideas?

2

I too have a similar situation. Upon power up, I see the choice to go into safemode, then the screen goes black, with the cursor. If I wait about 5 minutes, the computer boots up and I can use it. This happens about half the time. I notice that when I get to Windows, the Avast Premium Cleanup is on the screen, having “Fixed the Problems”, that I fixed a week ago.

I have tried looking for some kind of setting where I can get Premium Cleanup to NOT do it’s automatic thing, but can’t find a scheduler or task program.

The black screen issue has been happening much before the Premium Cleanup is automatically cleaning the same thing this last week.

Any helpers out there?

Windows 10

3

→ https://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=63.0