Repairing Avast needs to restart you operating system

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi there,

I’ve been using avast home now for quite some time. I began having this problem of “Avast needs to restart your operating system” and I just ignored it since it would reoccur on every reboot.

I read the forums last night and tried everything mentioned in about three different threads. I found that sometimes using the uninstall utility and clearing out everything on the pc that is related to avast still didn’t help. I then tried installing the latest program and it gave me the “unable to located aws…something” file, please reinstall the program.

Well much to my dismay, I was about to give up and purchase some other AV program but was hesitant so I gave it one more try. Here’s what I did to fix the problem:

  1. Restarted the pc in “Safe Mode” only.
    2- Used (reglite)/regedit to find all instances of Avast, Alwil, asw*… files that caused me problems and deleted everything… Please back up your registry!!!
    3- Used the Avast aswclear utility to unistall avast.
    4- Rebooted into “Safe Mode” only
    5- Repeated steps 2
    6- Rebooted into “Safe Mode” only
    7- Ran the install program again… (no errors) - do not schedule a “Boot-time scan”!!! if you do your pc will lock up until you hit the “Escape” key!
    8- Rebooted into “Safe Mode” only again. Make sure you have no other issues. Open Avast and it should start up with everything disabled or something like that.
    9- Rebooted again normally and now my Avast is running like a champ!!! YES! TG. It was driving me crazy.

I do want to thank all you techies here who are loyal to this program for helping everyone out. It helped me out a lot. Even though, this issue of “Avast needs to restart you operating system” seems to have no true fix from what I’ve read on the other posts. It just seems to either fix itself or the person just succumbs to it.

I hope this helps out some else out there with this issue.

GL

Angelinheaven

2

The latest VPS update is checking for old program versions and if out of date will update the program as will, this would require a reboot.

I don’t know if this was one of the things you read or tried. If you are continually asked to reboot, try this.

Operating system restart needed by avast message - First check the contents of the C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\Setup\setup.log file, which should show you why it thinks the reboot is needed.

This could be solved, in some systems, by deleting the file C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\Setup\reboot.txt

If that doesn’t resolve it check this (running the uninstall utility as you did would probably have cleared this):
You can also check this registry entry (right after computer restart):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager, if it contains “PendingFileRenameOpertaions”.

Check its contents and if there’s only “reboot.txt” from avast4\setup folder, delete PendingFileRenameOperations, don’t delete any other key.
Back-up (export) the registry key before you edit/delete, just in case.

3

Hi again,
Thanks for the update, this may help but in my situation it did not help. I wish it would have. I read these steps and followed them too but to no avail.

For others, please do try them.

I wish it would have helped. .
Angel

4

So long as it is working for you now, that is the important thing.

Welcome to the forums.