Hi,
I'm new here, and am in desperate need of some help. I run XP Home, use a Qwest 1.5MB DSL connection, and have been using Avast free antivirus, and Zone Alarm's free firewall, but have recently switched the antivirus back to AVG's free version.
The reason I switched back to AVG recently, was that I had to constantly click on the program update of Avast, wait for the def stamp to download, which took anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more, whenever I couldn't get on the net (page cannot be displayed).
Sometimes this would happen again shortly after getting on the net, when trying to go from one site to another, and often times I'd just deactivate the antivirus.
After some trouble removing all the leftover pieces of Avast from the registry following the uninstall, I finally got no more of it's keys showing up with regedit>Edit>Find>Avast searches, so I downloaded and installed the program I used to use, AVG.
Now I seem to be still having the same problem, and deactivating the antivirus corrects it, although I did deactivate the Zone Alarm too this time, so I'm not positive it was the AVG.
I've checked the Zone Alarm settings for IE, and AVG, and it's set to allow access for both. My Internet Options settings are at the default, and the SP2 firewall is turned off.
There is no firewall in my DSL modem blocking any ports, so I really can't figure out what's causing this. Qwest just checked my line, and it's had no interuptions since I reconected the power plug to the modem almost two months ago.
I was worried CCleaner might be causing it, as it doesn't seem to be working right. It doesn't keep the cookies I program it to for very long. After a while I look in the Options>Cookies window, and the ones I put in the right column have disappeared.
I've run sfc /scannow, and Disc Manager error checks twice each in the last month, to see if I had any XP problems. The first time it was due to a program called Total Recorder causing conflicts with Windows Movie Maker, which later I found was corrected by setting TR to disable accelerated recording mode.
The second set of tests were done due to the net connection problem. I am a bit worried I may still be having software conflicts somewhere. When TR was conflicting with WMM, I got a lot of End Now (not resonding) messages when trying to reboot, and since upgrading to the full version of TR, I have noticed this happening again, although not as often.
I'm trying to get TR's MP3 ID tag detection to work, but have not been able to, and am still awaiting an email from their tech team after sending the debug info they requested.
Sorry for the long post, but I'm really baffled about this, and I can never tell when it's going to happen. Thorough virus scan checks with Avast before uninstalling, and with AVG after installing, have produced negative results (no viruses).
Please help me with this if you can, thanks.