Bah. Today was my more-or-less annual cleaning day on my PC. I really should do it more often, but it’s always a pain to get everything disconnected from the back of my PC and remove it. Well, I removed it, and got the inside of the desk’s PC cubbyhole dusted out. I then took the PC into the next room, and vaccumed it out (with the help of some compressed air purchased from Office Depot). Like I said, I really should do it more often, especially as dust buildup had destroyed my old video card on the night of the Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks Fight Night. Anyway, once the system was cleaned up and good as new, I popped it back into the cubbyhole, hooked up the cables, and booted the system back up… and that’s where things fell apart.
Before today, I had been using ClamWin Antivirus for my PC. However, as much as I like ClamWin (which is a Windows port of the Clam Antivirus software I use for my mail server), the one thing it lacks is an on-access real-time monitor. So, I decided to throw Avast onto this machine, as I had had luck with it before. I had removed ClamWin and installed Avast before shutting down the PC. When the machine came up, it went through a full virus scan before boot… and crashed during logon. Crap.
A couple of aborted logons later, I FINALLY was able to log in using my little-used Administrator account and get the Avast software uninstalled. Once that was done, I was able to log in using my own account and survey the damage. Fortunately only Steam and Logitech SetPoint were corrupted and required a reinstallation. I’ve since installed AVG Free Edition and it’s working fine so far.
It’s kind of amusing, in a full-circle sort of way. I went to Avast from AVG in the first place because I was trying out Windows XP X64, and AVG didn’t support the 64-bit version of Windows (and Avast did). It’s annoying that Avast didn’t work out for me this time, but I don’t really mind going back to AVG. Now, once ClamWin reaches 1.0 and supports real-time monitoring, then I’ll probably go back to it and see how that works out. For the time being, though, I think I’ll stick with what I have.