Originally the client updated avast from a 5.X version. I believe she did that 2 to 3 weeks ago.

When I got it I disabled zone alarm (stopping the services) and stopping the autostart. Then I updated windows will all updates from Microsoft update and then I uninstalled avast and rebooted and all the problems were fixed. After this I did a fresh install of the todays current download version of avast 6 (not sure of the exact version I am at home now…) Anyways all was fine till a reboot then all of the problems were back. So I uninstalled again and that is when I found this forum. Anyways just after I posted I saw the link to the 6.1 beta. I installed that but it did not fix the issue. Again after the reboot no taskbar, no start menu, slow to appear desktop, more than 1/2 of the autostart services including DNS client were not started and although some of these would start DNS client was one of the ones that refused to start with an error about an RPC timeout.