I have been downloading Avast Home Edition 4.8 continually since this same time yesterday morning and I am exhausted!
I am told the installation was successful, I am able to register, get a license key and succssesfully enter it.
I can also change my settings on the interface.
I get a message that I have upgraded my OS and the Avast will not run on it and I must reinstall.
Also I have never had the Blue Ball icon show up in the system tray even after entering the license key successfully.
This is not the case. I am running Windows XP SP3. I had McAfee but have fully unistalled that.
Between each new attempt to download I unistall 4.8 Home Edition and clear my cache.
I have also shut down my WebSweeper as that had been known to interfere with my Adobe downloads.
I did all you advised Tech as well as doing all Windows updates before starting again.
Another thing I did was to shut down Web Sweeper as I remembered that that program gave me trouble with Adobe downloads.
Al went fine after that and so far I am finding Avast to be smooth running and very easy to use.
Glad that everything is fine with you now bluesjuke.
In theory, Web Sweeper is a temporary file cleaner and should have not a problem with avast updates.