I installed Avast and on my first reboot it was scanning my drives until I cancelled half way through. Now when I reboot absolutely nothing works on my PC. I know the mouse and keyboard are connected but I can’t open any progam, can’t get to My Computer or even open task manager. I can’t even do a clean shutdown, I have to pull the plug!
I am not impressed about having to do a rebuild! Can someone please help?!
Hi Tiff,
did avast detect/delete any virus ? or came any other messages ?
Why did you cancel the scan ?
can you boot the PC in SafeMode (F8-Boot) ?
Do or did you ever have any other AV-Scanners on the PC ? maybe preinstalled ?
Please describe your Hardware and preograms running in the background
A bad sign. There’s a high likelyhood Avast deleted a Windows system DLL file, because of a virus in a Windows system DLL file. Loosing Windows functionability possibly is a warning sign of a Windows system DLL file being deleted, thus a missing Windows system DLL file.
If avast! detected an infected system file, it would warn the user and ask what to do with it.
In my opinion, it seems like a conflict of multiple antivirus programs, as whocares said.
Can you boot to Safe mode?
I cancelled cos it was scanning 2 x 20GB HDD and I wanted to get on the net quick! No reported errors though.
I’m still running Sophos AV and zone alarm in the background.
Celeron 500m, 512mb RAM, XP Prof sp1.
If I’m quick, when I boot and as soon as the avast icons appear on the taskbar, if I quit I can now get use of my PC.
I think the same :-
Uninstalling the conflicting applications could help the user to boot the system.
But you can test if ‘disabling’ one of them would work in all circunstances. Take care, some situations can not be easily reproduced and what works now could conflict in the future 8)
This is why there is a warning during setup about NOT running two resident/Background AV-scanners together 
→ Boot to safeMode (repeatedly press F8 when booting)
and then permanently disable either the avast Resident Shields or Sophos AV-Monitor;
see sophos’ / avast’s docu&help on how to do this…
Thanx everyone for your help 
Yeah I learned this the hard way a few months back. I had a anti virus and decided to installed I think it was Panda. I couldn’t even get my PC to boot up right, had to do the whole safe-mode thing and uninstall one of them. >:(
Never ever have two or more antiviruses installed and running on your system. If you think avast! is not enough, you can always use one of those online scanners… best of all in my opinion is Trend Micro’s Housecall - link:
Cheers !