I just signed up for the board to notify anyone who has the Avast 5 issue where the shields ( and Windows Firewall ) hangs on startup for 30secs-1minute that I may have found a fix. I’d tried all the fixes posted with no dice. This was a fresh reinstall of XP on the machine and I had run all the Windows Updates.
The fix. I checked my services and found that there was a service related to .Net runtime 4.0 installed that was ‘stopped pending’ . I hadn’t had .Net 4.0 installed before, so I uninstalled it.
You can keep .NET Framework 4 installed. It’s a stupid problem MS doesn’t seem to be able to fix.
My fix does the trick so you can have fast booting system and .NET 4 installed.
I have an XP machine that seems to take forever to boot. I rarely ever use it because it is a house machine that either the kid or other company use. I was going to give it away after reloading the operating system just to find out that the person I was going to give it to has absolutely no internet access where they live.
I have gotten accustomed to the speed of Windows 7 (improved processor, memory, operating system) that I just wrote it off as being normal for an older operating system, processor, memory, etc.
I don’t know if I will be uninstalling .NET 4.0 because I don’t exactly know what the consequence would be. It seems to offer many improvements. I would disable the service before uninstalling to make sure there were no unwanted or harmful effects.
The consequences are that any .net program that requires .net 4.0 to run won’t run. There aren’t that many applications around that require .net 4.0. The whole .net framework is non-essential, it is only required if you have an application that requires a .net version to run. That can be any number of different versions I have one that requires .net 1.0 another that requires .net 2.0 and another that requires .net 3.5, for me this whole .net framework is a mess.
Generally it is when you install a program that you find out if a) it requires .net framework and b) which version is required. If you happen to have some version of .net installed already and the version you have covers the installation requirement you may not be aware of its requirement at all.
Paint.NET v3.5.5 - Download, released on April 25th, 2010
This update fixes a bug when saving 8-bit images, improves layer composition and Gaussian Blur performance, and is now updated to support the new .NET Framework 4.0 in some cases.