Registry Cleaner Removal

I have a compaq presario v2000, with 512 mb of ram and a 1.8 ghz AMD sempron processor, with microsoft xp home edition. I had installed norton antivirus 2002 nearly a year ago from a CD my dad had, and it was fine, until I ram a free virus scan on the internet and found out that I had 5 viruses on my computer. I then installed avast antivirus, and it installed OK, but I had not uninstalled norton beforehand. I then read that I had to uninstall norton first, so I uninstalled norton, deleted all of it’s program files, ran the norton removal tool, and edited my registry so it is clean of files with the name "norton" in them. I restarted my computer after doing all of that. I looked all over the internet on ways to remove norton, and I tried all of them. Then, assuming norton was removed from my system, I installed avast again. I ran a boot-time scan, but then when my computer was nearly finished booting, avast gave me a message telling me that norton antivirus was still running
Avast told me that norton antivirus was still running and that it was incompatible. I have now registered avast, and it tells me that 3 our of 4 scanners are running. These scanners are: internet mail, outlook/exchange, network shield, and web shield. I am missing 3 of the scanners that should be running. I don’t know if my system is protected or not, and I have searched far and wide in my computer for anything titled "norton" and so far I haven’t found anything. But still avast keeps telling me that norton is running, and as a result, avast cannot sucessfully run. I really need help on this.

PLEASE DON’T ANSWER UNTIL YOU HAVE READ MY ENTIRE STORY, OTHERWISE YOU WILL TELL ME TO TRY SOMETHING i HAVE ALREADY TRIED.

thanks for your help, I really need it now.

Typically Norton has installed several other programs. From your description, it appears that you missed the major key term:

Symantec.

Uninstall any symantec software, especially LiveUpdate.
Avast is good, but what I’ve done in similar circumstances is to install AVG antivirus, and then uninstall any others, as it can run on top of others. http://free.grisoft.com

Good luck!

-Additional answer after comments—–

There may be another answer for your woes, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news. From the sound of it, you might have a bug that is emulating Norton behavior, which can interfere with other AV suites. If you have uninstalled Norton completely, there is no reason why you should be getting the errors that you are getting. I’ve had NAV2002 installed/uninstalled so many times from 2002-2006 that I lost count, but I never ran into your current problem

A virus could very well be the source of your problems now. If that is the case, I would try to do a scan at bootup with an emergency boot disk. You may have to go to another PC to create it, but almost any AV suite has the ability to make this disk, which can eradicate any known virus from the safety of a bootable CD, which will override your Xp installation.

I hope that’s not the case, but that would be my last attempt before a complete rebuild of your system. The good news is that if you haven’t performed a completely new install of XP in the last year or two, then you are overdue for it anyway. It really gives you a performance boost.