system
1
Today I removed another AV product and put avast! 4 in charge of duties. Configured it to check the multiple email accounts/multiple email clients on my PC. Everything worked well. Made sure I had the latest updates as well.
However after using the computer for a while I started to notice problems. Text began to disappear from my windows, desktop and taskbar. Eventually the system got so unstable I had to reboot. This happened a second time and now I am thoroughly frustrated.
This is the only piece of software I’ve installed in the last few days so I am pretty sure the issue lies here.
Any ideas?
WinXP Pro, 512mb RAM, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 80gb HD.
igor0
2
If you were using Windows 9x, I would say you are probably out of resources - but on Windows XP, this really shouldn’t happen. I don’t think avast! may influence other programs’ windows, desktop or taskbar…
system
3
as far as i can tell, it seems like a memory leak.
The labels of my desktop icons were also erased, leaving just the shadows. Other taskbar icons that relied on text alerts (for one, i have a icon that tells me how many emails i have waiting, another reports my system temperature) were also blanked.
Couldnt log off, switch users or anything. 
Do you have another AV product installed alongside avast?
What else (e.g. firewall, etc) are you running with Avast?
I uninstalled Norton prior to installing avast!
No software firewall (I hide behind a router). I do use PeerGuardian to cover my tracks when on Kazaa, that is the closest thing to a firewall I have installed.
system
6
Reinstalled today. At a moment where my machine got rather sluggish I went to Task Manager. When it finally came up I saw memory usage of one of the components (not sure if it was ashServ.exe or ashDisp.exe) climb from 48M (when I noticed it) steadily to over 70M… then drop back. I don’t know if VRDB has anything to do with this (the icon was spinning) but I did disable it.
Hope this helps in finding an answer…