I am not sure what has happened.

I am running windows vista home premium.

We were without power for 10 days in Dayton and when the avira updated the umbrella is now shut and the guard is stopped. It is grayed out and I can not start it. Also a couple of other strange things like firefox will not start. I never see an error but it never starts.

I sure would appreciate it if someone could help me on this. It is my daughters laptop that she uses to attend college online.

Thanks so much,

Charlie

Its acting too weird 2OG.

Too many things just don't work. In case it matters, the laptop was not on when the power went out.

sfc /scannow flashed the hourglass for less than a second and I never saw anything after that.

I can't even get uninstall to work for firefox. I even installed Ccleaner to try and uninstall it and all it does in either case is flash the hour glass for less than a second. I am not sure but I think the help desk at the college had my daughter install firefox to alleviate a signon problem she was experiencing. Firefox was already installed on the laptop.

Another interesting thing. I uninstalled MS Office student 2007 and when I rebooted Avira started working again. I think :)

Unless you have some other ideas I will probably just run the recovery disk from Toshiba and start over.

BTW, if I do attempt to use the recovery cd's is there another effective free firewall that is simpler to use than Comodo Pro? I wanted to install zonealarm since that is what I have on my pc but it complained of a missing/bad driver on the vista OS and aborted the installation.

Let me know what you think the best plan of action would be.

OK, I think I have everything back up and running.

The sfc problem turned out to be a permissions problem. I discovered that you could shift-ctl-enter to run it as administrator. It claimed there were unresolvable problems but I do not know enough to resolve them.

I manually deleted the firefox application directory and re-installed. Same problem. Uninstall worked this time. re-installed. same problem. uninstalled and re-installed to a different application directory and all is well. I changed the application directory to "New Mozilla Firefox".

I still can't figure out why uninstalling MS Home and Student 2007 fixed the Avira umbrella. I re-installed it and everything is still working. Probably a coincidence.

Thanks for your assistance. Sorry to have involved you. I know you are a busy man.