Help!

Yesterday I uninstalled Norton antivirus and had chosen to try Avast 4 Home Edition. I went through the downloading process from the Avast website and at some point was given an option to perform a scan in the boot process, which I chose. As the scanning process was long I went away for a bit and returned to find my laptop in hibernation state and could not get it to respond, so the screen was black. I unplugged my laptop. Avast isn’t loaded but now I find that I cannot get on the internet using Internet Explorer. I get strong signals but internet explorer comes up but with the message it can’t connect.

I don’t know what to do, but am considering either loading anew version of internet explorer or firefox. I am using Windows Vista. The worst case I guess if to reload my whole operating system. I already tried to restore my system to two days before but no luck. Please help me. Thanks

Norton is an absolute pig to get rid of even after an uninstall and can cause issues with oyther security software.

A link worth looking at, which is a program removal tool that can remove the remnants of a number of different Norton Programs:
Removing your Norton program using SymNRT
Or ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/removal_tools/Norton_Removal_Tool.exe