Thanks DavidR for yr quick response. It is now set as ‘Show detailed info on…’
I d/l the eicar zip, attached it to an e-mail and attempted to send it to myself. I received the alarm sound, strip warning at the bottom of my monitor for a few seconds and the mail could not be sent. Nothing else. I do not know if that is now the normal action taken by avast. Scanning the zip file (on my desktop) with avast gave me a few nano seconds sound warning, nothing else.

Maybe this issue is due to something else that has gone wrong on my puter some time ago. It could never be resolved by anybody.
Quite a few of my progs are giving problems and all of them give me a ref to Kernel32.dll (invalid page vault) as the cause. Progs such as Index dat suite, spywareblaster, spywareguard, hijackthis, filemap, startupmechanic, vjpeg, etc, etc.
Replacing the dll with an original from my CD (W98SE) did not resolve the issue.
Scans with avast, a-squared, ad-aware and spybot report all clean.
As this problem too deep and wide and not applicable to this forum I will accept yr answer and live with it.