This is what I’ve done.
Downloaded all required for a fresh install of Avast Free, removed cable, uninstalled, reboot & in Safe Mode ran ‘aswclear5’, reboot, checked and Avast gone, reboot again.
Now W7 and its Action Center very happy, no icon in system tray and therefore no warnings although I have no av at this stage ???
Installed ‘setup_av_free’ w/o any hiccups, went online, reregistered and updated vps.
Only one notification from Action Center - ‘Windows Firewall is turned off or set up incorrectly’ which I accept because as far as I know PC Tools fw would have switched it off.
Now for the twist, floating my cursor over the Avast icon in the system tray, after I rebooted, and Avast is confused - ‘avast! Antivirus: Attention, your system is not fully protected.’
Trying to open the user interface takes exactly 35 secs, warning reads Real-time shield = off
Hitting ‘Turn on’ has no effect and of course the same when hitting similar option at the bottom of the window with the full descriptive red text warning.
Then I ran Sophos Anti-Rootkit, all partitions, which took 45 min but nothing mentionable, a few entries where I had too long file names for stored URLs.
The only clue I have is via this pop-up after a/any reboot:
Registry entry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswRdr\Parameters\WSIgnoreLSPDefault” (created) :
New entry was set to <nl_lsp.dll,imon.dll,xfire_lsp.dll,mslsp.dll,mssplsp.dll,cwhook.dll,spi.dll>
When I shut down completely and switch off mains, wait 5 min and boot up then I’m okay, fully covered by Avast, no warnings.
When I do a reboot then Avast indicates ‘ATTENTION Your system is not fully protected. Please use the Fix Now button to start fully protecting your system.’
At this stage Avast is in that sloooow mood and none of these options effective.
If anybody knows what that Registry change means I’m back to normal