I run ADD/REMOVE and selected Avast! I got a window with the title RUNDLL and it said this:

Error loading. The specified module could not be found.

Then I went round this loop again and this time I got an ‘Uninstaller Error’ message Window which said

An error occurred while trying to remove avast! Antivirus. It may have already been uninstalled.

Would you like to remove avast! Antivirus from the Add or Remove programs list?

I replied YES and then went and used awsclear.exe which gave me the following info:

Resident protection - Removed Mail protection - Removed Explorer extensions - Removed Registry - Removed Program files - Removed avast!4 was successfully removed

However most of the contents of the Avast folder in Program Files seemed to be intact.

I reboot and reinstalled Avast. At the end of the reinstall my StartupMonitor utility (which watches to see what is being out into the systen for laoding at startup said this:

The program avast! has registered the executable "" to run at system startup.

Do you wish to allow this change?

I said YES and took a look at the registry where I saw that the following key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\

has Avast entry with a value of “”. This is familiar!


I rebooted. On starup there was no Avast icon in system tray and a blank System32 folder window appears at boot-time which was not appearing in the boots before I started this process.

GRRRR! What do I do next? AVG 7?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ has Avast entry with a value of “”


I used Avast Tweaker (in Avast Ext Control) to see the two icons. Then I rebooted.

On relaunch I got no icon(s).

ARGHHHHHHHH ! :frowning: