Continuous egg timer in Desktop

I have recently installed Avast Free edition after using AVG for many years. The first issue I had was the full scan took in excess of 6 hours and the second scan in DOS mode took a further 5 hours. However, my main problem at the moment is that the egg timer stays revolving while viewing the desktop and never seems to stop. I have a fairly fast PC running Windows 7 Ultimate. Any ideas please?

did you uninstall AVG before you installed avast?
did you run AVG removal tool to clear any leftover files that may conflict?

run and reboot - http://singularlabs.com/uninstallers/security-software/

Thanks for this, it was very useful as I had forgotten to clean AVG. The problem solved for a
short while and then returned. I am trying an experiment at the moment with Zonealarm being disabled. So far no problems today, so it looks like this may be the issue.

There have been reports of Zone Alarm conflicting with Avast! in some sys. Not all though.

If you need to try any other free firewall, this is a good place to start:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm