I took my machine in to the shop because of very slow performance. I had lots of virus and various spywares and stuff, and the tech told me I had too much antivirus software and with my permission took it all off. I had bought Trend a few months previously but it never worked properly and Trend tech support could not help because a Catch-22 situation had arisen:
Trend worked fine for a couple of weeks
Then stopped working properly
Then the uninstall process didn't do a clean delete.
Some dirt was left in the register and when I tried to re-install, Trend thought it was already installed and would not install. So they got rid of that.

I installed AVAST and it worked fine the first few times but then started acting really weird. It would 'find' many viruses but as it ran would only allow me to delete five of them. At the end, when I opened the virus vault, all I could see was many, many lines of a message that becan "Cannot remove [filename] because....." and the rest of the line ran off the screen and I could not display it.

I'm running under XP Home Edition 2002 on an Intel Pentioum 3 processor running at 930 MHz with 256 Meg of RAM. (Speed is not an issue for me.)

I've stopped e-mailing friends because I'm wondering if I downloaded Avast! from a phony site (although I was careful). But the thing is, I was working on some financial stuff that I need to finish before mid-December or I'm hooped. So I'm going to rent a machine. I'll check this site periodically. Hope someone can give me a clue, here.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get a new computer?

Are you close enough to a professional computer tech? He/She could take a good look at what you have and clear th works out except your 'good' stuff you need.

Well that's what I just had done (para. 1 above) and they returned it all squeaky-clean and I installed Avast! and ran it a couple of days, deleted a couple of viruses.

Then it went south, too, and because it's free software Avast! does not provide tech support -- just a quagmire of user sites which I have not found helpful.

But it's possible I installed phony Avast!.
(Some virus generators create a phony website that looks like an anti-virus website, but what you download and run has a virus.)

Though I did check the site as best I could beforehand.

I bought a flash drive yesterday and plan to
1. Back up my 'good' data files to flash drive
2. format both my main drives C: and D:
3. re-install XP on D:
4. re-install Win 98 on C:
5. re-install Avast! on D:
6. run Avast on the flash

and then see where that takes me. But it's going to take forever. Meantime I can't e-mail anyone for fear of giving them viruses.

bab,
I use Avast all the time myself, and have never had any trouble like you describe, so you may have downloaded it from the wrong site.
The following is the correct site to download it from:

www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

Just click on the word English in the list to download and make sure during the installation process, you tell it no to a boot time scan, or it will scan the whole computer every time you turn it on. If you'll be online later this evening, I may be able to connect to your computer thru Windows Live messenger, and help you if you like.
My other suggestion would be to go into the Control Panel, open Add/Remove programs, and find Avast there and uninstall it, reboot the computer when its done, then install the new version you downbloaded from the site I posted in this bulletin. Message me on yahoo messenger if you need to, my nickname there is the same as here.


chris

Chris, do you have any idea the trouble you have saved me?

I had only backed up my files to flash when I read your post. I had not formatted either hard drive. I uninstalled Avast! and downloaded and installed from the site you posted. The download and install took longer than my original. Then I ran it -- no viruses.

New lease on life! Thank you very much!

Glad to help!


chris