Hello, I’ve come here looking for assistance after something began to happen to my PC since the most recent update. I am not very computer savvy nor do I have a professional grasp on what I’m doing or what to know, so I appreciate any patience with me.
With that out of the way, since the last update a number of strange things have begun happening. Firstly, for about a day or two, my taskbar and desktop icons were repeatedly refreshing for no real reason and to this day I still have no idea why. It stopped over time, so this is only a potential symptom, I’m not calling that out on fault of the program. However, what started next hasn’t stopped: My Windows taskbar has been freezing up and restarting explorer.exe (which has crashed whenever this happens) doesn’t seem to work, forcing me to hard restart each time to fix this. The reason I feel Avast might have something to do with it is not only did this happen only some time after the update, but aside from explorer.exe’s crash, Avast is the only other program that freezes up when this occurs. This also happens after some time when my PC has been on when I click on my ClassicShell icon or any taskbar icon that isn’t already active.
I dug around for solutions and I have tried repairing Avast via Programs and Features using its own repair tool that came up. The only solution I really found was something some years ago about Event Viewer and Avast’s game mode being the cause. Yet, when I looked into Event Viewer, I found nothing related to the game mode feature, so I don’t think that’s it.
This is a very frustrating situation and I don’t want to simply turn off Avast in fear that it isn’t actually the source of these troubles. I’m unsure how to proceed, so I came here for help.
I’m currently using Windows 8 (not 8.1), running Avast alongside Malwarebytes (which have been noted to be able to run together, though Avast has had a few conflicts with Bytes over the years). I’ve run Bytes to fully scan my PC and nothing came up.
Also, if it helps any at all, I did find this on several errors in Event Viewer:
“The %1!s! Update Service (avast)!s! Update Service (avast)!s! Update Service (avast)!s! Update Service (avast) service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.”
EDIT:
Apologies for so many edits but I turned off Do not Disturb/Game mode, Webshield, and Behavior Shield and have not encountered the issue surprisingly.