System temporarily unresponsive after Avast starts

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi all,
I’ve been banging my head against the wall with this problem and I’m pretty much out of ideas so please help before I cry :'(.

I just rebuilt a RAID 0 machine (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4, 2 Gigs of Memory) with a fresh install of XP64. I immediately downloaded and installed all the latest service pack, patches, updates and hotfixes for it. Next was the latest drivers available for the network card, graphics card and sound card. I also put on the Intel Chipset drivers and the Intel Matrix storage manager. So it’s a pretty bare setup…

So onto Avast… successfully installed, updated and configured with the problem that after a user types in his password at the Windows login screen the system momentarily becomes unresponsive for several seconds (except for the mouse somewhat).

I tried the delay loading option in the troubleshooting section of the configuration but this only makes the stall occur after the user logs in i.e. the system doesn’t become unresponsive at the login screen, but as soon as the user sees his desktop the stall occurs as described above.

While experimenting:
-Tried reinstalling Avast after doing a clean uninstall in safe mode with the recommended uninstall utility, no change.
-Terminated all providers (persistently) 0/7, no change.
-Disabled service avast! iAVS4 Control Service, no change.
-Disabled service avast! Antivirus, no problem as expected by virtue of Avast been disabled.
-Stopped service avast! Antivirus and manually restarted it. This finished without a hitch and then it automatically started the mail and web scanner services which also completed without incident… i.e. the progress windows of each service completed and closed gracefully. However almost immediately the stall problem occured… everything but the mouse was unresponsive for several seconds. With the aforemenioned method I can reproduce the problem 100% persistently without rebooting or logging in.

Some help… please? :frowning:

2

My problem is very similar but not limited to only startup. I have a brand new Pentium Dual-core CPU, 2.5 GHz, 2 Gig RAM. When it arrived, it had factory pre-installed Norton’s AV software on it (not worth the hard drive it was taking up). So I did a full uninstall of the Norton’s, did a regedit and searched for any reference back to Norton’s, NSW, NAV (not navigation) and deleted the two references remaining in DirectDraw. Then rebooted the computer.

After the reboot, I downloaded and installed Avast 4.8.1335 Home Edition with Xtreme Toolkit version 1.9.4.0 and using Activeskin version 4.2.7.3. Allowed it to update itself, then ran a full scan on the clean PC. No errors, no issues, no problems.

On returning, it was unresponsive for nearly 2 minutes, presumably this is when it was updating it’s antivirus base… so that’s okay. However, when attempting to click on the quickstart of any program hotlink on the toolbar or the Start button, I have to wait 2-3 minutes for it to respond.

If I uninstall Avast and run without any AV software at all, it runs as fast as it is supposed to. Reinstall Avast and update it, and the problem is back again.

I’m with MysticX with just about ready to bang my head against the wall… or grab a sledgehammer and enter input now. A brand new computer, I haven’t even loaded 1 gig onto it yet and Avast has nearly crippled it with inefficiency. Any additional information you need, please ask. I’m sure Mystic and I would be more than happy to cooperate.