Avast! seems to get very busy in the background during Windows startup. For instance, that chord ("The Microsoft Sound"?) that usually plays as the desktop appears, sounds all broken up and stuttery. Of course I could live with that, or without the sound altogether, but last night I thought I'd try tweaking some settings to see if I could get Avast! to time its loading and memory-testing a little differently.

This morning I turned on the computer, the bootup process looked a little different (no Windows "flag" logo, for instance) and just when the Microsoft Sound was supposed to start, the computer froze -- black screen with a green band across the top. I'm guessing the memory test stepped on something it shouldn't have. Waiting a full minute didn't change anything, there was no response to Ctrl-Alt-Del, and when I used the Reset button the problem turned out to be persistent.

I tried a few other things, finally restarted Windows in "Safe Mode," went into Msconfig and disabled Avast!. This time I got my normal desktop back, though with the icons all scrambled from Safe Mode.

Avast! had already said that it worked by "rerouting" incoming and outgoing e-mail through itself, in effect pretending to be a mail server. Sure enough, when I connected without Avast! my e-mail program was trying to connect to Avast! instead of my ISP. I had to go into my e-mail settings and edit the incoming and outgoing server names by hand.

When I get around to it I'll look for info on Avast!-related crashes like mine. In the meantime, I'm doing without it. I don't want to bother going back to AVG because the virus database there is now several months old with no way to update it.