My desktop PC has recently (well over the last 6 months actually, just kept putting off doing anything about it!) slowed right down & has been driving me mad - particularly when using the net.

It would suddenly take ages to load pages & stuff & the hard drive could be heard whizzing back & forth. It was obvious it was doing something in the background & yet nothing was showing up under taskmaster.

Now I know a number of you have had similar probs & everyone always says "virus" "spyware" etc., but I know the machine is clean - I use Avast antivirus & antispyware & also run Windows Defender - also have MS malaware installed & everything showed up clean.

Eventually I tracked the problem to my PREVIOUS antivirus programme which was AVG!

I know many of you were running AVG &, like myself, had probs with it & switched to Avast. Well, when I switched to Avast I obviously uninstalled AVG - used the "uninstall programme" under control panel - I'm running XP with all current updates BTW.

Unknown to myself not all of AVG uninstalled - although it wasn't showing under "My programs" & all the desktop icons etc had gone I eventually found that it was running "avgrsx.exe" in the background - which is basically the auto scanning prog - I never found out how it was triggered into starting as there was no longer anything scheduled etc, but somehow it was occasionally starting up & running for an hour or so during which time the PC was virtually unuseable.

Having finally discovered what the prob was I went to uninstall the remaining AVG files - found using the "search" facility. Uh Uh - couldn't uninstall as when I told it to delete came up as access denied - presumably part of the antivirus security to stop a virus from disabling the programme!

To try & cut a very long story short I eventually rebooted in safe mode with command prompt & dredged back in my memory for DoS commands I hadn't used for 10 years or so to find & delete the files - Hey Presto, PC is now running at sensible speeds again & not hammering my hard drive with unnecessary & unwanted scans.

I don't suppose I'm the only one to have suffered this, so if your PC is slowing down do a search for old anti-virus software if the usual culprits don't fit the bill!
Hope this helps someone!

When you start the Run dialog in the start menu and you type msconfig, you see all programms which are started when you power up your computer. There you can also disable these programms.

[Edited on 14/1/10 by ruudbeckers]

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Originally posted by ruudbeckers
When you start the Run dialog in the start menu and you type msconfig, you see all programms which are started when you power up your computer. There you can also disable these programms.

[Edited on 14/1/10 by ruudbeckers]

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I tried msconfig - AVG did not appear on the list!

Just as a thought wouldn't something like Ccleaner remove this?

"Just as a thought wouldn't something like Ccleaner remove this?"
No, won't touch it - this was what made it so annoying, everything sees it as a legitimate programme & assumes it's meant to be there - as I say even when trying to remove the files manually wasn't simple.