I have no idea about the WinME machine (Igor may be much better at handling this) (btw you’re saying you used avast previously - and with no problems?) but about the XP problem:

until shutdown and get ashserve error, a long error message, obviously video related.

ashServ.exe error, saying stuff like ‘… caused an error and needs to close bla bla’? Or what you mean by “video related”?
Do you have any kind of dump files that we could analyse?
Or maybe - are there any unpXXXX files in the \data\log folder? (XXXX is a random number)

Thanks
Vlk