Blue Screen issues post-Avast

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi all,

New to the boards. Thanks for taking my question. :slight_smile:

I’m running an Acer Aspire E380 desktop, Windows Vista Premium, plenty of HD space, 2GB RAM.

Recently, I decided to install Avast. Someone was discussing it on another forum and I was curious. Installation went fine, and after I peeked at the program, I decided to uninstall until a later time. The normal Add/Remove Programs method wasn’t doing anything with it, and so I used the uninstall tool on Avast’s website: http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-uninstall-utility.html

The uninstall tool seemed to have removed Avast, but I’ve been having blue screen errors ever since. They occur seemingly at random, either during startup or shutdown, and never happened prior to Avast. The blue screen does NOT happen every time, though. I’d say it doesn’t happen more often than it does.

Blue screen goes by so quickly that I couldn’t tell you the error message. It does dump physical memory to disk, however, so I suppose I could send those dumps to someone if they’d like (who can explain how to do so). I have six dumps starting from November 23, which is when the problem started.

At the risk of wounding my pride a little, I should note that I may have caused the problem myself. I have McAfee Security Center running on this PC, which includes antivirus and firewall. Sometimes, after the system recovers from a blue screen crash, Windows offers to look for the cause itself. It identifies one of McAfee’s components (antivirus, firewall) as the cause and says I can fix it by running their automatic updates. That does not fix the problem, however, and I never had these issues with McAfee before. Could some remnant of Avast have been left behind to cause a conflict?

I use this computer for limited browsing, through Firefox. I keep tight security settings and also have NoScript. As I almost never visit random websites and simply do not download unfamiliar attachments/programs, I’d be very surprised if this were caused by a virus.

Thanks for your thoughts. They’re very appreciated!

2

Well, if you uninstalled avast!, I pretty much doubt it could cause subsequent blue screens.
However, you can try to send the minidumps to Vlk’s e-mail.

3

Hi Igor,

Thanks for the reply. :slight_smile:

I in no way intend to insult the program, of course. Just seems odd that these issues started right after I uninstalled Avast, when nothing else out of the ordinary was done. Could be coincidence, of course, but it was worth asking about.

If Windows is correct and McAfee is suddenly causing issues, I suppose I could see if uninstalling that helps. At worst, I guess I could just make a backup image of my system and then see if recovery DVDs will help!