Ok. I followed a few suggestions with mixed results.

  1. I rebooted W2K in safe mode with networking and ran AVCLEAR4.EXE again. It pronounced success. I rebooted and the attempts by Avast to delete two registry keys appeared again. That didn’t work.

  2. I used REGEDT32.EXE to change the permissions on 12 “legacy” registry keys which then allowed me to delete them. I suspect that these “legacy” keys were there to provide a history for Microsoft of what was installed and uninstalled, and therefore may have intentionally been left behind after an uninstall of Avast. I’ll call that a success.

So, I’m back to the original problem…

Where is the startup script or registry key buried that endlessly tries to remove the two Avast startup keys? I’ve searched through the registry and various places to hide batch files and found nothing with ashDisp or ashMaiSv inside.

System Startup Global Entry: Value Deleted
Entry = Avast!
C:\Progra~1\Alwils~1\Avast4\ashDisp.???
Entry = ALWILS
C:\Progra~1\Alwils~1\Avast4\ashMaiSv.???