Thanks for all your suggestions. What an ordeal this has been…Avast screwed up everything on this computer. When I could start my browser or email programs, they wouldn’t connect…and I couldn’t shut them down. They just wouldn’t shut down, and when I tried to delete their processes in Task Manager I was denied access…same thing when I tried to delete the Avast processes, denied access. I also couldn’t shut down the computer in the normal way, nothing worked except pulling the plug or turning off the computer itself from the off/on switch. ;;
I tried System Restore but there was only one Restore Point from midnight just before this problem occurred. And even that wouldn’t work.
I also tried stopping the Services connected to Avast, but was denied that also. I couldn’t even set them to Disabled.
I mentioned that I had tried the add/remove programs in Control Panel, many times but that didn’t work. I also used ERUNT to restore the Registry from a few days previous. After that I tried the add/remove again and this time when I ran Remove there was an Uninstall option. I ran that and the Avast uninstall started up but it was broken and wouldn’t go past the first command line, and the green bar was stuck at about 1/4". I gave that many hours to complete before I gave up…and of course Avast doesn’t give you a way to quit the Uninstall, so I had to pull the computer plug again. The great thing about WinXP is that you can pull the plug while it’s working, and that doesn’t add much time(a few extra minutes) to the next reboot. I had to do that once on a Win7 computer and it took more than a day just to be able to start up again.
I also mentioned I tried Avastclear.exe but it gave me the “not a valid Win32 application” bs. This time I tried the older Avastclear10r4.exe, that’s the one for computers without SSE2 instructions(which my i7 computer definitely has). This older one actually worked, though it was tricky since it couldn’t reboot my computer into Safe Mode since my computer, under the influence of the Avast installation, wouldn’t shut down. So I had to reboot(ie: pull the plug) in Safe Mode and then run Avastclear10r4 again, and this time it worked. Gloriously, after a reboot, no more Avast…the internet works again, I can shut down the browsers and email normally, I can delete processes in Task Manager, So far, all the little things that stopped working, are back working again.
So thanks again for your help. It’s good to know there is an active help forum here.
And I’m curious to know if there is a way to run Avast in a manual mode, where I use it to scan files and folders of my choosing, and I chose what happens to suspect files (ie…not an automatic quarantine/deletion), and I chose which sections/modes I want to be active. Is all this possible, or is Avast one of the “my way or the highway” antivirus programs?