Hey guys. Recently I tried to uninstall avast! and everything seemed to go okay. Upon rebooting, I got the Windows XP logo and the loading bar as usual, then got a black screen with a cursor. The cursor moves so the system wasn’t locked up as far as I can tell, it’s just I can’t see anything.
I’ve also tried several things from these forums and Google. I tried the avast! uninstall tool in safe mode (Yes, I can load Windows fine in safe mode). I tried using Control Panel → Add/Remove programs in safe mode. I even downloaded several uninstaller programs such as RevoUninstall. I simply cannot load Windows XP without having avast! on my computer. The only reason I can talk to you all right now is because I had to reinstall avast! just to get Windows to run. As far as I can tell any method of uninstalling I’ve tried has gotten rid of avast!, but it seems to me like avast! changed something with the way Windows XP starts that I can’t seem to figure out or revert. Here are my system stats (this computer is a desktop, by the way):
Manufacturer : Hewlett-Packard Company (Compaq Presario)
Mainboard : Asus Amberine M
Chipset : ATI RS482
Processor : AMD Athlon 64 3500+ @ 2200 MHz
Physical Memory : 1024 MB (2 x 512 DDR-SDRAM )
Video Card : Radeon X1300/X1550 Series
Hard Disk : WDC (250 GB)
DVD-Rom Drive : TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-H552L
DVD-Rom Drive : UZ2427Y XPF191E SCSI CdRom Device
Monitor Type : 17 inches
Network Card : Realtek Semiconductor RT8139 (A/B/C/810x/813x/C+) Fast Ethernet Adapter
Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.01.2600 Service Pack 2
DirectX : Version 9.0c (October 2008)
If you need any more information please let me know, and thank you in advance for taking a look at this. I’m hoping I’m missing something obvious here and that a fresh pair of eyes can help me out.
Avast is the only one I have had on this, though I have had two anti-spyware programs on it. Malwarebytes anti-malware, and SUPERAntiSpyware, both of them being the free editions. At the time I installed avast!, I had SUPERAntiSpyware on my machine, having uninstalled Malwarebytes about a week earlier. I removed SUPERAntiSpyware about two days ago thinking perhaps there was some sort of conflict going on. I removed both anti-spywares with the uninstaller that came with the programs.
I know it is odd, but I truly have not had any anti-virus of the sort on this computer. Nothing even came with it when I bought it. No Norton trials, no McAffee trials, nothing.
And yes, I can uninstall avast! just fine in safe mode. The problem is that once I do that, however, Windows will no longer boot properly and leaves me with a black screen and only a cursor. I hope this helps, and I thank both you and Charley for helping out, I really do appreciate it. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can tell you guys to help with this.
Right now I can boot into Safe Mode just fine. In fact, I had to boot into Safe Mode to reinstall avast! so I could log on normally. So the only thing uninstalling avast! seems to affect is logging into Windows XP normally.
Well, I just got done running a chkdsk and everything came out fine, but that was a very good idea, so thank you scythe944. I appreciate it. To be honest, I was kind of rooting for something to be amiss, but sadly everything seems okay with chkdsk. I’m going to continue to work at this and check up regularly, confident that sooner or later one of us is bound to figure it out. Thanks again guys for your time.
It’s been a little over a month now, and I’m happy to report the issue is now resolved! It turns out the issue was that my userinit.exe file had become modified thanks to a nasty virus of some sort. This somehow caused my logging into Windows to be dependent on having avast! running. Still trying to make sense of that, but hey, it’s fine now. So after replacing my userinit.exe from my recovery partition, all is well and I was able to successfully uninstall avast.
I’d like to thank the talented people who offered their support one final time. I appreciate how helpful you’ve all been, and hope my resolution to this problem might help others who have a similar problem. Take care folks.
Tech, I am currently trying out AVG to see how it works. I noticed that not once in this whole thread did I ever actually say why I wanted to uninstall avast! See, I actually have no problems with avast! at all. It’s a very good piece of software. I just want to try several different products to see what’s right for me. For all I know, I might be reinstalling avast! again.
