AVG locking up

I am not 100% certain, but I believe my new AVG program is making my computer lock up whenever I leave the computer on but dormant.
I'm running WinXP, IE7 (though it still says 6), can't think for the moment what else you'd be asking for. oh, yes. ram. 1gig.
we uploaded AVG from disc. I had great difficulty doing so, it would save just about 8kb and not go any further. so I had my husband do it and I don't know what he did to goose it into action, but it worked. so now I'm completely covered by AVG, but I can no longer leave my computer running to seperate squabbling cats, answer the door or run the wash without it locking up so completely I have to turn off the switch on the power strip-nothing else works.
any way around this without starting over from scratch?
thank you!

 

you may have something else running that is locking up your computer, and maybe your harddrive is getting full, just some suggestions...open up the task manager, (ctrl-alt-del) and under process tab, sort the colums by cpu, anything at the top (or bottom depending if its sorted descending or ascending) that is using alot of cpu?

 

thanks for your input. it brought up some interesting things for me.
I tend to stay out of the tech type areas of my computer, so I hadn't checked things this way recently.

amazing. never checked in there. can't keep up with it. it changes literally second by second. but the only big one is the System Idle Process, and it stays at 90+ most of the time and stays at the bottom of the list. the other 2-5 show up mostly as 2 and 3. oh. AVG just showed up running in the 10's, it may be updating files right now. mind boggling trying to grab the will o' wisp action of the changing files.

you've made some good points. no other antivirus running, though MSN wants me to-not the trojan one, just MS's standard one that comes with the computer. do have Spybot and Adware downloaded, but set to run when I tell them to, not automatically. nothing else of that sort on this computer. since very early on, on this and an older computer of mine, MS's antivirus, which doesn't run and I can't seem to extract from the computer, brings up a window during boot-up that says there's a problem with the antivirus and it can't run. so if it's there but not running, and didn't bother AVGfree, I assume it shouldn't bother AVG full coverage, which is what I have, now.

seems I'm a bit short on physical memory? I have 576.88 left of 1,024MB.
30+mb of that is AVG!

ok, I'm looking foolish here. it does say that I am running IE7 on it. it did say IE6 some time back. go figure. anyway, system info. is the easiest place to find all of the information, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm using SP2.

I'm using a standard Windows screen saver, starscape. I've noticed that it bogged down older computers of mine in the past....

it just freezes most everything. I can do a few things, maybe close a window or two, and that's it. the toolbar freezes, the pages often go blank, and anything that remains visable is not clickable on. sometimes the pointer changes either to an I bar or to a double pointed arrow, then goes back to the pointer when it isn't moving. no errors show up and no thump or ping sounds come from anything I do.

hope that answers everything.

oh, I got AVG full coverage because I ran into a Trojan on a website with AVGfree. AVG shouldn't have any trouble blocking the Netsky trojan, I wouldn't think. it's such an old trojan. I didn't get it, as far as I can tell (didn't click ok on the window that would have given it to me, clicked cancel trying to get into the webpage. someone told me which trojan it was when I asked a list I'm on regarding it and the website.)

 

something new came up. I haven't allowed the computer to lock up again, but while online this error came up-IE has encountered a problem and needs to shut down. the program that caused the problem? an addon called AVGssie.dll. my safesearch program in AVG. does that explain the lockups I've been having?

 

Thanks, Halo and Plodr,
if I can get my husband out of his loop, I'll have him redo AVG. never have wanted a Yahoo toolbar, last time I got snagged with one it messed things up, also.
I'll poke around in...Admin tools and see if I can find what happened-and I only just learned abt SP3 being available a couple hours ago when someone on my hometown chatlist ran into a problem and asked questions. hadn't kept up with all of that. otherwise, all my standard updates are running fine, if anything's out of date it may be Adaware or Spybot, I don't run them as often as I probably should and haven't tried to update them. AVG shows one ad and quite a few cookies I need to remove, probably won't have time until the holdays are over.