AVG update broke my computer?

Ardent

Hi all

My PC went beserk last night after updating AVG (free anti-virus s/w) and I'm not sure why. Maybe somebody here has experienced what I went though last night or knows what might have happened. I'll try to explain in as much detail but first, my PC specs:

Abit A17 motherboard
P4 2.8 GHz
1 GB Corasair RAM
Powercolor Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB
ATI Catalyst drivers (4.9? (doom3 hotfix beta))
Bog standard 17" CRT monitor

Built the thing myself late June and had no problems with it until last night. No weird s/w installed in yonks. My PC runs for days at a time before it gets a manual reboot.

Last night, I upgraded to version 7.x of AVG. Did a re-start, it didn't shut down properly and I had to reset the machine.

This is the weird part. After booting up, the desktop was acting very stange - the My Computer icon was flickering furiously and I was unable to double click anything on the desktop, doing so resulted in the pop-up menu you usually see when you right click.

I restarted the PC again and, this time, after the XP loading logo, rather than displaying the desktop, the monitor powered down. Although the PC was still running, all I was getting was a black screen. Restarting the machine and going into safe mode, everything was fine. No amount of changes in safe mode would fix the issue that was happening when XP started in normal mode.

The PC was like this all last night apart from one occasion when it got to the desktop successfully. I decided to leave it and check it again this morning before going to work. Same problem this morning.

After a bit of research on the web, I went into safe mode again, uninstalled the catalyst drivers, installed the latest intel chipset driver (with AGP support) from Abit's website and re-installed the catalyst drivers. Rebooted and it worked!

As of this morning, before I left for work, it was working again. I can't be sure if I actually fixed the problem, at least not for a another couple of days. Has anyone else been though this or knows what's going on? I don't want this to happen again.

Thanks,
Ardent.

RicardoSmith

Software conflict. Just an unlucky combination of software and drivers. Do you have a restore point you can revert to?

seamus

Check your event viewer (right-click on My Computer -> Manage -> Event Viewer.

Invaluable when strange things start happening. Avg installs some virtual drivers, so as Ricardo says, sounds like a conflict somewhere.

stevenmu

Is/was there any other anti-virus software installed too ? If so check that it's fully uninstalled, they never play nicely together. It would also be worth uninstalling any spyware/adware scanners or anything that'll stay in memory and monitor what's going on. The uninstall AVG and reinstall it. If that's ok, start adding back in the others one by one, rebooting each time to see where the conflict is.

RicardoSmith

I should add that I've just installed the latest new Freeware AVG version with no problems. Well other than it found a Virus and alterted me.

po0k

You should have removed AVG6.0 first.

Ardent

Thanks for thne replies lads.

RicardoSmith: No restore point. I had System Restore turned off. Doh!

Seamus: Thanks for the event viewer tip. Genius!

stevenmu: The only anti-virus software I ever had installed was AVG

SyxPak: If it was necessary to remove AVG 6.0 before upgradng to 7.0, surely AVG wolud have informed me of the fact rather than upgrading itself automatically?

Anyway, my PC is back functioning normally again. Removing the ATI drivers, re-installing the Intel Chipset drivers and re-installing the ATI drivers seems to have done the trick. I still need to look into backing up everything on my PC, I was really worried for a while!!