XP pro Right click blocked

Hi.

So just done a full XP pro rebuild on my pc installed avast free for XP Version 18.4.2338.
everything working fine except if I right click on an icon, then the PC just stops for a while until you get the not responding message, if you then do Alt-Ctrl-Del and end the offending program which in this case is explorer.exe the desktop resets and thing works for a while.

So I have added an exception for c:\windows\explorer.exe to avast and then every thing works just fine, but I don’t like having the exception.

So has anyone else had this problem or know of a fix other than adding the exception.

There are not many users with XP left, best you wait for DavidR.

I only keep this pc on XP because the video editing software I have is to old for any other windows.

seems my fix by adding an exception only works for a little while then the same problem rears its ugly head.

Not much value in waiting for me, it is working just fine on my XP Pro SP3 system.

Can you be a little more specific about right clicking on an ‘Icon’ ?
What Icon, Where and what are you trying to do, etc. etc. and I can try to replicate it.

That may have to wait I have something else going on, whilst very little CPU is being used (a few percent) minimising/closing windows is sloth like.

EDIT: Back from the dead, I was unhiding desktop icons, right clicking one for properties worked fine. Also played around with right clicking explorer image thumbnails and renaming them, all of which worked. I also used the right click to delete an old desktop shortcut image which had been left behind, deletion went fine.

If you can be more detailed in what you were doing I can try it out ?

OK so to clear up some points .

  1. this was a fresh install on a fresh build of XP pro.
  2. if I right clicked on my computer icon it would fail, if I right clicked on any desktop icon to say delete it it would fail, if I right clicked on any icon in any folder it would fail, tried waiting but never did anything even after 20 mins

I had not given up on finding a solution myself , and as it was working fine till my HD failure which is why I had to do the fresh install, I decided to do some thing different.

uninstalled avast in safe mode using avastclear.exe then installed an old version of avast 17 from 2016 ( just happened to be the the newest off-line installer I had ). Everything was working fine with this version, then reconnected pc to network and did an update of the avast program.

still working fine after the update ( so far ) so it looks like it is related to it being a fresh install of XP pro and a fresh direct install of avast 18.4.2338
I have no idea as to why that should be as the latest version seems to work just fine if you update from an older version.

will report back after a longer test period.

thanks to the people who replied I know XP is not supported by many now days.

You’re welcome.

As I said I would, just reporting on how the reinstall of avast went.

Still working just fine no problems encountered, so I guess installing older version and then doing an upgrade to the latest is the was to go if you need to install on a new install of windows XP pro.