today i got a red avast pop up telling me that an error occured during an update. i clicked on the lil box to read what was the exact problem and it didn’t work. so i tried to open avast and it told me that the licence key was invalid. i searched through my e-mails to get the key they sent me ages ago , tried it, and it still says the key’s invalid. i then decided to suppress avast from my computer to install it again and i couldn’t suppress it. now my question is : how do i know if avast still works ? and can i install avast again when i still have a broken version of it on my computer, or will it crash my computer ?
Check your system date, especially the month and year.
Check the about avast, Updates expiration date and ensure it is in date.
How long is ages ago ?
avast home is valid for 14 months and you have to reregister and a new registration key will be sent avast! 4 Home Registration.
What do you mean by suppress, uninstall/disable, etc. what ?
Previously the only element that may have been broken was the VPS update, the rest should have been working, however, I haven’t got a clue what you did in trying to suppress avast so I can’t say for certain.
What is your OS ?
thank you for replying so quick.
well when i say ‘ages ago’ i actually mean last july so my version of avast should still be good.
when i tried to suppress avast i went to the ‘supress/add’ list on my computer (sorry i’m french so the names are different and i dunno how to call the section i went to in english :-[ ). so i selected ‘avast’ and then clicked on ‘supress’. that’s when the following msg appeared :
avast !
a setiface error has occured : 3
try to reinstall or contact support please
i was just wondering if reinstalling avast would have no bad consequences on my computer…
and what do you mean by OS ? sorry 'bout my frenchness :-\
OK, Suppress in this case would be remove, as in the Add Rempve programs of windows.
A reinstall is likely to fail for the same reason that the uninstall failed. It would appear that a part of avast is corrupt.
Try a repair of avast. Add Remove programs, select ‘avast! Anti-Virus,’ click the Change/Remove button and scroll down to Repair, click next and follow. You need to be on-line to do this.
Check if this works by trying a manual update of the iAVS, if that doesn’t work then download the avast! Uninstall Utility, find it here, run that and reboot, then try an install of avast.
the problem is whenever i select avast and click on ‘change/remove’, i have this message that pops up, so i can’t scroll down. in fact whenever i click on change/remove, for any other program, it just says ‘are you sure you wanna remove that program’. i tried to scroll down but there is no ‘repair’ section.
OS = Operating System, windows ?
From this it would appear that you have win9x and that aparently doesn’t have repair. But the fact you are able to open the Change function yet not see the repair (it is usually the last option when you scroll down) is strange.
So you are left with running the Uninstall Utility (click the ‘find it here’ link in my last post), reboot and install avast again.
If you run
C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe “C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\Setup\setiface.dll”,RunSetup
What do you get?
i finally managed to uninstall avast with the uninstall utility link you gave me in a previous message.
i then re-installed avast on my computer and everything seems to be working just fine now.
thank you all for your help !!! :-*
Glad we could help, a belated welcome to the forums.
Glad you’ve won 
Feel free to come back and ask for help anytime you need 8)