Vista and AVG redux

It seems that my problems with AVG Antivirus were not solved in the long run. Whenever I rebooted the computer, the resident shield stopped working until I did a repair reinstall of the program. I figured that was a problem I'd deal with eventually since I didn't reboot the laptop all that often anyway. (I usually put it into hibernation when I shut it off.) Well, this morning, AVG ran it's automatic update and as part of that process it game me a blue screen of death! I don't blame Vista, I blame AVG. After that unpleasant reboot so long AVG. I went hunting and found Free antivirus - avast! 4 Home Edition which is free for home use. And, according to the site, "avast! antivirus fully supports Windows Vista". So, it's installed, and running as I expect it to.

Vista Upgrade and Antivirus Software

This post mostly relates to my experience with AVG AntiVirus and it's sudden non-working state after Upgrading to Windows Vista. However, anyone considering an upgrade should at least read through the next paragraph.

According to the booklet that comes with Vista one of this things you should do "before you begin" is to "update your antivirus program (if necessary), run it, and then disable it." To this I would add, uninstall it. I say this due to all of the Web pages I've read trying to solve my AVG-specific problem.

What happened to me has happened to many others from the sound of it. After upgrading to Vista, the free version of AVG insisted that the license code wasn't legit. Funny, since you don't generally need one for a free version. Every time it started (at boot) it asked me to reactivate my license with a code I didn't have. Because I couldn't fulfill its request, it failed to load and then continued to mess with Outlook since it wasn't running. So, off to the Web for a solution I went.

There were several suggested solutions that I found:

• Reinstall AVG over itself.
  This didn't work at all.
• Uninstall AVG then reinstall it.
  I, along with others, was unable to uninstall the program via any of the suggested methods.
• Delete the directory containing the AVG files then try to reinstall.
  I moved the files (so I could replace them if it didn't work) yet was unable to perform a successful reinstallation.
• Install an old version of AVG, then reinstall the current version.
  None of the previous versions I could find would install over the current newer version.
• Find an illegal license key online and try using it.
  None of them worked as a key & a user name were both needed. I no username so none of the keys would be accepted.

During one of the reinstall attempts I noticed that there was not only the "repair" installation option but also a "total reinstall" option. When I used the total option, a license key was displayed. So, I got that far and copied the license key. I then stopped the installation and reran the original program to force it to ask me for a key again. I pasted in the key but it still insisted that I needed a user name. I tried my name thinking I might have used it when I installed AVG way back when but that didn't work. Taking a chance, I tried the user name "free" and it suddenly worked!

I rebooted to make sure everything was alright and AVG did start as expected. However, the resident shield wasn't working. I performed a repair install and the problem was solved.

I hope someone else who has this problem finds this post and the solution works for them.