Hi. I just installed the free Home version of Avast Anti-virus on my XP machine. The initial bootscan seemed to run correctly, but then when the machine started to boot to Windows, the screen went dead (black, but not “displaying” black . . . dead black).
Now when I reboot, the screen acts normally just long enough to see the opening “Windows XP” logo, then it goes dead again. From the sounds of it, the PC boots up correctly.
I restarted in Safe Mode and removed the MacAfee software that the PC came with, but that didn’t help.
I restarted again in Safe Mode and removed the Avast software, but that didn’t help either. Can anyone offer some advice? Thanks in advance for your help!
Did you install avast! before you uninstalled the mcafee antivirus? AVs often interfere with each other correctly installing. You can try the avast! uninstall utility to remove all traces of avast! and see if that fixes it. http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-uninstall-utility.html
Thanks, sded. Yes, I’m afraid that I installed Avast before removing McAfee (I never activated McAfee, so I didn’t realized that it would be a problem).
I downloaded and ran the Avast uninstall utility but still have my dead screen. Any other ideas?
You can see if McAfee has a removal utility, but may be something more subtle. Since it restarts in safe mode, it is probably a driver issue. So first thing to try is a System Restore to back before avast! was installed, then a McAfee removal. If not possible, take a look at ms configuration (msconfig from the run command) and look to see what is being loaded at startup. If anything looks like mcafee, stop it from loading.