1

Thanks for your time.

Awhile ago I installed Avast on my home PC, let it run the boot time scan, and it returned only a black screen. After a looooooong wait the screen went away and windows XP SP2 booted normally.

However, recently I installed Avast on a second computer (Windows XP Pro) and its boot scan actually shows what it’s scanning, so now I’m concerned over the first computer’s lack of visibility.

I went here: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=9262ddb8f0071fbf981de2053b83164c&topic=22564.0

And checked for this problem (hence the title of this thread) and indeed I did have the system set up to show a gui on boot. So now I’m confused.

My problem is virtually identical to the problem from the thread mentioned above, the computer reboots, shows the “starting windows” screen, and then goes black with a lot of HD and CPU activity for a good hour or so, then loads windows normally.

So my question is, why can’t I see the “avast! antivirus / Press Esc to bypass scanning” screen while my XP home system is scanning?

I’m pretty stumped, and would appreciate any assistance. Thanks for reading this.

2

Can you please post a full content of your BOOT.INI file?
Thanks.

3 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Does that help at all?

4

Have you ever experimented with any tools (tweaks) that modify the Windows startup screen?

BTW what about the pre-OS chkdsk, does that work properly? (run [from the command-line]

chkdsk c: /f

and when it asks if you want to run it on next system start, say yes. Then restart the machine and see if chkdsk’s UI is displayed correctly).

Thanks
Vlk

5

When I ran chkdsk c: /f from my admin account and restarted, it showed the “windows starting” screen and then went blank.

Yes, I’m currently using flyakite osx which does modify the “windows starting” screen - is there a registry tweak I can do to fix the apparent omission of a gui (which is what I gather is happening in my case) or do I need to just uninstall the program altogether?

In any case, thanks. That definitely seems to help in pinning down the problem.

6

Do the manufacturer give support?
Did you Google?

7

Fixed. Ran flyakite’s uninstaller on only the boot screen element of the program, and rebooted twice.

Thanks for the help.

8

Thanks for posting back. Glad everything is fine for you now.