avast! Free ver. 6 + COMODO Firewall + XP SP3 = Lag and Lockup at Startup...

Jair_Crawford · January 1, 2012, 4:33am

I was directed here from the avast! support forums. I will copy/paste the discussion so far:

"avast! Free ver. 6 + COMODO Firewall + XP SP3 = Lag and Lockup at Startup…

Jair Crawford:

… which is odd because both avast! and COMODO have run on this system in the past in perfect harmony. But recently, during startup, there have been times when the system really lags, none of the system tray icons except for the network icon and the avast! icon will load, and various programs will not load after I click on their desktop icons. To complicate things further, if I open the taskmanager and attempt to kill a task, the taskmanager locks up as well.

At first I thought this was either malware, or a corrupt system file issue, but after ruling out the malware through scans and a thorough combing through of the registry, and performing the system file protection scanner to fix any system file issues, the problem still persisted.

I decided to experiment and performed a complete uninstall of avast! 6 in safe mode, and when I restarted my computer, everything loaded perfectly. There was no lag, all the systray icons were there, and I could open my programs with ease. So I thought maybe my avast! was just updated incorrectly and decided to do a full re-installation from scratch. I install avast! again, restart the computer, and my startup is locking up on me and lagging again. My programs are once again not loading.

So I did another test, and this time, I removed COMODO but kept avast!. Now, it’s running better. Not perfectly (firefox doesn’t want to load for some reason), but everything else works with just avast! installed.

The problem is now I don’t have a firewall and I need to figure out why firefox won’t load (which may be completely unrelated to all this, for all I know.) I would rather use COMODO over Windows Firewall, but it doesn’t seem to want to work with avast! any more.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

Edit: Also, happy New Year!

Jair Crawford:

I currently have COMODO Firewall uninstalled, and I have avast! installed. I’m restarting the computer right now (typing from my laptop).

Ok, I did notice a few things. Upon shutdown, there were quite a few hanging processes that took a while to end. There are still some system tray icons that should have loaded by now upon startup, but only the avast! and the network icons are up.

However, I am able to get Internet Explorer to open, which I wasn’t able to do when I had both COMODO Firewall and avast! installed. And I can kill tasks in taskmanager without it locking up on me now. Firefox is still not loading, and I don’t know if it has anything to do with any of this.

Before, when I had both installed, I could hardly get any program to open (including COMODO). But now, even with just avast! installed, some of the tray icons are still not showing up. What I’ll do is, I’ll go into safe mode and remove avast! again, then restart it and see if the tray icons are loading properly, and to check and see if Firefox will work, so I can rule that out.

Jair Crawford:

Ok, so I uninstalled avast! and restarted. The first thing I noticed was that all the tray icons are loading perfectly now.

Firefox is still not loading, so we can probably rule that out as a separate issue.

OK - So my computer just restarted on me, randomly. o_o

… I’ll be keeping that in mind. That is odd…

Now I’m going to restart it. I’m noticing a lot of tasks are still hanging. “End Program - 7fc This program is not responding.”, for example.

So I’ve come to this is what I know so far. Right now;

PC without AV and Firewall - Strange random restarts, hanging tasks at logout, firefox won’t open.

PC with just COMODO - Same as above.

PC with just avast! - Same as above; add problems with loading tray icons.

PC with avast! and COMODO - All of the above + desktop and taskbar lags, hangs, and the task manager will freeze if I try to kill any processes. Note that this does not happen every startup, but it happens a LOT of the time. The majority of the time.

So I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ve checked for malware, defragmented, checked the system files, recently got the computer cleaned out (dust) and a new fan put in, did a thorough chkdsk scan, and other things I can’t remember at the moment. lol

I’ll go ahead and post this information at the COMODO website also, but there’s more to it than just COMODO, and now, it seems there’s more to it than avast! as well.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what’s going on?

Boris_3 · January 1, 2012, 9:02am

Your problem didn’t arise after an upgrade of Avast or CFW, but appeared all of a sudden if I understand correctly.

It could be due to a memory problem with your PC. You can test it with a progam like Memtest 86. Download it here http://www.memtest86.com/, burn it as an iso file to make a boot CD. Before launching it :

read the technical info on Memtest 86 site
don’t forget to set the bios for booting on CD first

Jair_Crawford · January 1, 2012, 7:32pm

I’m currently doing a memtest 86 scan and I’ll let you know the results as soon as they come in. Thanks for the link. As to your first question, I don’t know. I’m at home from college over the break and the computer that’s having the issues is the one at home, so I don’t know if the problems started after updates or randomly.

Edit: No problems found in the memtest.