John,

I can't really think of anything else right now.

If I was in your position, and had a) a spare hard disk, and b) a burning, stubborn, passionate desire to crack this, I would:

- pull out the current HDD, put in the spare, load a clean install of Windows, add SP3 then load Avast, see if it works, then keep adding apps and testing until it fails (if ever), not forgetting windows patches.

Otherwise I'd give up and go back to a previous release of Avast, or try an alternative.

SD

Yes - I think I'd also go back to 4.8!

Have you tried selective 'shields off' to see if it is trying hari kiri?:)

What I would do:

- Uninstall aShampoo (search for my rant here about 3rd party firewalls being more trouble than they're worth)
- Reboot
- Uninstall the network card(s) from Device Manager
- Reboot and let them get detected again
- Turn on Windows Firewall instead
- Check the port allocations for Windows Firewall wrt Avast
- Check whether Avast updates
- If not, reset the winsock stack (netsh winsock reset catalog)
- Check again

:ok:

I'm inclined to be a bit suspicious of the firewall, too. A google around shows a few posts with users having problems updating - not only Avast - while using Ashampoo. Uninstalling Ashampoo seems to be the resolution.

If it were me, I'd rather keep Avast and use another firewall, if it came down to that.