David & Technical,

I made a mistake when I did not write at what point I deleted that registry key. I did delete it and I deleted a bit more but I omitted to put this important info in my post to this board!

To go back to what I did actually do … after I found that much of the contents of the Avast folder in program Files was intact, I deleted as many of the entries as possible although there was one DLL which was locked so I had to leave that.

I also went to the registry and deleted the following entries:

(1) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run - I deleted the Avast entry

(2) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ALWIL

(3) This put me in the mood to delete a bit more so I deleted all the keys I could find with “avast” or “alwil” in them. There were about eight or so of them. I hadn’t done this zealous deleting of registry keys before so I figured that it would not be the sole cause of my current problem.

So in fact I have done what you suggested in your most recent post but it still led to my reinstall not being right.

“Technical” asks me what folder I install Avast to. He is right to suspect that I change the default … the very first time I installed Avast it was to “C:\Program Files\Avast”. However I later installed to the very similar named but different folder “C:\Program Files\Avast!” (with the exclamation mark at the end). I did this deliberately to try and get a new clean install of Avast as I was having icon problems by then.

I have not installed to the default which I recall is “C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast”. And I prefer not to do so as I do not remember supplier’s names as well as I remember their software’s name.

Furthermore he is uneasy about StartupMonitor. However it just alerts me whenever a change in the startup locations is attempted. I usually let the change go ahead but I find it useful to know and remember that something has been altered.

I really don’t want to go back to AVG. I was on version 6 and stripped it out when I heard that support and updates for 6 was being stopped but the word was that version 7 was more bloated. I like what I have seen of Avast and would much prefer to use Avast. But of course, I need it to install correctly.

So what do I do now? I suspect that Avast will have yet other registry keys which I have not touched as I presume that it’s registration flags and countdown timer of days used is hidden somewhere in the registry.

Rgds, Smolls