I’m having a problem with Avast on a number of machines recently where windows XP fails to log in and just sticks on the “Loading personal settings”.
It’s actually happened to me on three different machines very recently and I haven’t been able to find out why. If I remove Avast each machine seems to start up and log in perfectly fine but as soon as I put it back it just happens again. I’ve used the Avast uninstall utility but it hasn’t made a difference.
I did a bit of hunting around on the net and it doesn’t seem to be just me having this problem.
Did you have any other antivirus on the machines previous to installing avast are these clean installs of xp on them?
If you had nortons or macafees then you need to use their removal tools before putting on avast.
Have you tried cleaning them with malware bytes free recommended on full scan? and remove what it finds.