I’ve been using avast for 3 or 4 years. I have 4.8 with the latest updates. The last week my outlook 2007 would not shut down all the way. When I close it, the icon in the system tray turns gray. It won’t go away till I open the task manager and end the outlook.exe process. I’ve discovered that if I stop the standard shield protection even after shutting down outlook. Outlook then closes. I don’t know what’s happened for outlook to hang while the standard shield is running. Outlook exchange, Internet mail can be running and it will shut down completely. Should I reinstall avast to see if it has a corrupted file?
Any reason to be using 4.8 and not version 5… The majority of the users are trying to help troubleshotting version 5 since last year (beta phase) and not the 4.8.
I had a similar problem develop while using Outlook 2003 on a Dell Inspiron Laptop running XP Pro with Avast 4.8.
It had 512 MB RAM and I added another 512 MB RAM to hopefully speed up some sluggishness I had noticed. That took care of the problem with Outlook. I’m not saying you need more RAM - just providing a little information that you might find interesting.
I later tried MSE on the laptop and then two months ago replaced MSE with Avast 5 and the laptop runs quite well (better than with MSE installed).
Since you are using Outlook before you install Avast 5 you might want to be sure you read this thread (especially you are running multiple user accounts):