I had this problem with AVG on two machines running Vista and found a
solution that worked for me in the AVG Free forums:
------------QUOTE-----------------------------------------------
Try this:
Take AVG out of your registry startup items. Either use msconfig to
disable the startup item or open regedit and go to
HKLM\software\Microsoft\windows\CurrentVersion\run and delete the AVG_CC
entry)
Create a new txt file, and rename it from a .txt file to .vbs. I called
mine Start_AVG.vbs. I created this script to delay the startup of the
AVG Control center for 30 seconds. Copy the following code into the new
VBS file you created:
'------------------------------------------------
dim WSHShell, strProgPath
set WSHShell=CreateObject("wscript.shell")
wscript.sleep 30000
strProgPath = """C:\Program Files\Grisoft\AVG Free\avgcc.exe""" & "
/STARTUP"
wshshell.run strProgPath,7,false
'------------------------------------------------
Now copy this file into your "Startup" folder in your start menu.
Restart your computer and about 2 minutes after your desktop appears,
AVG will then appear in your Notification tray.
Something apparently isn't started up all the way when AVG wants to
start up. This solves the issue. Hopefully this will help until Grisoft
fixes the issue.
--------------ENDQUOTE--------------------------------------------------
The only thing that I changed in the instructions quoted above is that I
reduced the OP's original startup time of 120 seconds to 30 seconds.
Waiting two minutes for AVG to load, as per his original instructions,
was excessive. Through trial-and-error, I reduced it to 30 seconds,
which works very well on both of my machines. YMMV.