I have been using Ad-Aware for several years with Windows-XP, without problems. My current version being Ad-Aware 8. In April this year , for some reason the program crashed and could not be re-started. No new programs had been installed so whatever the conflict it must have been with pre-existing programs. My computer has a Celeron 2.40 Ghz CPU and 2 Gb of Ram, but since then it has been running so slowly that it takes nearly 10 minutes to start up and any programs take between two and five minutes in starting. Trying to sort through a list of data on a CD can take an hour or more, when it used to take 10 seconds. I have tried to dis-install the program and have also tried installing the latest version of Ad-Aware, to no avail. All I get is the message: Service "Lavasoft Ad-Aware Service" (aawservice) could not be stopped. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to stop system service. The system then tries to re-configure Ad-aware and comes up with the message: Fatal error during installation.

After 6 months of this I can't take any more. I haven't tried deleting the program manually as I presume that this wouldn't affect the way it has configured the computer and might cause greater problems. Has anyone any suggestions as to how I can get my computer back to normal again?

Regards

kh1

With the symptoms you describe, it sounds like your system may be infected - some malware prevents security programs like Ad-Aware from running. Any time your computer starts acting funny, you should get right on it - waiting 5 months is a long time should you be infected with keyloggers or anything which compromises sensitive data.

Read the instructions in my signature about posting a log in the HijackThis forum. Copy/paste or link to this thread to describe the problem, and somebody there can help you with malware removal.