Almost every time I boot my Windows 8 machine, I get a message from Action Center complaining that “windows defender and avast! antivirus are both turned off.”
Usually it takes several clicks on the “turn on Avast!” dialogs to get rid of that message.
How do I get rid of this annoyance?
Hello and welcome to the forum! 
Try a repair of avast:
Control Panel → ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS (or Programs and Features) → choose “avast! Antivirus” and select “REPAIR”.
Restart your PC again.
DJBone
I hate to say, but this doesn’t fix the problem.
The Action Center error message finally disappears, but that’s after I clicked on “Turn on and update avast! Antivirus” (which seems to run something called VisthAux.exe)
Next time I reboot I’ll do nothing and see whether the message disappears by itself (startup timing issue?)
(BTW how do I include screenshots in a post? “Insert image” seems to want a URL…)
I encountered this problem yesterday with the action centre not recognising avast on a Win7 system though, a repair didn’t help so a simple un-install and re-install fixed the problem with no need to run the removal tool.
This is actually a timing issue: after booting, when “launching the desktop” a lot of things seem to initialize asynchronously. By the time the Action Center starts some AV/WD stuff is probably “not yet ready” so the Action Center complains. If I just wait (haven’t timed it but seems like several long minutes) then the message disappears…
“This is actually a timing issue: after booting, when “launching the desktop” a lot of things seem to initialize asynchronously. By the time the Action Center starts some AV/WD stuff is probably “not yet ready” so the Action Center complains. If I just wait (haven’t timed it but seems like several long minutes) then the message disappears…”
I had the same thing. I found that if I temporarily prevented my anti-malware software from initializing at start up and rebooted that the message about Avast and Defender went away. Then, I re-started the malware programs. I have three of them - too many; I’ve got to uninstall one of them. They may be creating conflicts depending on their initialization order. Even a reboot by itself may work.
I have been suffering the same problem… It is a windows error
Run this section “Re-register WMIUTILS.DLL|” from here http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-does-not-detect-installed-firewall-antivirus