I recently did a fresh reinstall of windows 7 64bit, when switching out my boot SSD. The installation went fine, and one of the first things to go onto the fresh drive was avast internet security which I had a full license for and has been pretty well behaved for the past few months or so. Upon restart today internet security started but was warning I was unprotected so I clicked resolve but got nowhere, after some looking in services it looks like the AVAST antivirus service cannot start (the avast firewall service is running fine), and when a i try to force start it i get “error 1067: the service terminated unexpectedly”, which after some searching is basically a “yeah it’s broke” useless error message. I then decided an uninstall/reinstall may help, however I “uninstalled” avast internet security via add/remove programs and it appeared to go ok. Avast disappeared from the add/remove programs list, the shortcuts disappeared from desktop (although it didn’t prompt me to restart the pc), so I restarted only to find avast STILL RUNNING. So back to the add/remove programs list and it’s not there anymore?
I’ve tried 2 different 3rd party “stubborn program” uninstalling softwares and they don’t even see avast is on the pc at all. So my query is how do I remove avast from my PC (nevermind getting it to work that’ll come after). I know I could just boot into safe mode and just nuke (delete) the installation folder, but I know for a certainty that that option will not be painless or clean.
Any ideas on how to remove avast internet security after it’s eaten it’s own unistaller and even windows can’t see it (even though it’s running)?
Ever since avast changed to become more “user friendly” I’ve had many different niggling issues with it trying to do stuff I haven’t asked, or more frustratingly trying to obfuscate settings/stuff that used to be 1 click away 