Cannot turn on mail shield

I recently updated to avast 7, and the sandboxing feature was giving me bluescreens (via aswsnx.sys), so I tried repairing avast. It gave me an obscure error, so following the advice I found on the forum, I ran the avast uninstaller (in safe mode) for avast 7, then installed avast again. After that, the mail shield would not start and repairing was still broken, so I ran the avast uninstaller for avast 6 and 7, then installed avast again. Now, repairing works (or at least, the installer program starts without an error) but the mail shield still will not turn on.

From avast’s summary page, I see “ATTENTION Your system is not fully protected. Please use the Fix Now button to start fully protecting your system.” The big red “FIX NOW” button does nothing.

Below that, I see “Real-time shields: off”. Clicking the “turn on” button does nothing.

On the real-time shields page, on the circle displaying all the shields, mail shield is the only one with a red border. When I hover my mouse over the mail shield icon, it’s status is “UNKNOWN”.

The mail shield page says, “PROTECTION STATUS: SERVICE STOPPED Please run the avast! service first to activate this shield.” According to my task manager, AvastSvc.exe is running.

I am running 64-bit Windows 7 SP1. My version of avast is 7.0.1407. Whenever I try to manually update either the virus definitions or the program itself, the update hangs on step 1. The first time I try to run either update, avast.setup.exe runs for a moment, then terminates. When I cancel the update and try again, avast.setup.exe does not run again.

How can I fix this?

Edit: Scratch what I said about repairs working. I’m once again getting an error when I try to repair avast. The error is:

avast! Setup Fatal Error
Error reading product data from "C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\setup". Setup cannot continue.

I don’t know how to deal with the mail shield not working (i have the same problem) but if you wnat to repair or reinstall avast you should

  1. download avast uninstallation tool (google for it)
  2. reboot windows into safe mode (google how to do this, it’s simple)
  3. run uninstallation tool
  4. reboot in a normal way
  5. download and install avast

http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility

Don’t use the uninstall utility. Just uninstall through Windows Program Uninstall in Control Panel (in safe mode), then reboot & reinstall Avast.

Are you suggesting this for other to follow, or are you saying what you already did? Is it working for you?

My parter found this fix for me here on these forums as I was having the same issue.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=94356.msg751373#msg751373

I have windows 7 32 bit and after following the pretty simple instructions the issue was fixed.

You will find your system32 files in - C/Windows/System32/Drivers

I tried the Avast uninstall utility & had the same problem as others. Using the windows uninstall in control panel however did work, & my subsequent installation of Avast (including Mail Shield) is working normally.