Not a specific problem, just general question

Hello and welcome to TSF.

No, it's never a good idea to have more than one antivirus installed. It can cause problems including slowdowns, system hangs and even crashes. Choose one to keep and uninstall the other.

Any antivirus program must be removed via add/remove program.
For any program that doesn't have an add/remove entry, you will have to do this:
re-install the program -> reboot -> uninstall

If you're looking for an alternative to Ad-aware, you might look into MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware, the paid version of which also has the real time protection.

ah, i did not see "general quesitons" sub-thread woops... so any real-time protection is considered "anti-virus" in some sense.. and I should not use it in conjunction with avast? And yes I like malware's.

any real-time protection is considered "anti-virus" in some sense.

Click to expand...

No, it's not.

I can't get the old ad-aware version without the anti-virus guard

Click to expand...

Ad-aware in this case is an all-in-one application, i.e. anti-spyware/adware + antivirus.

You can have anti-spyware/adware applications installed along with an antivirus application, as long as they do not have the anti-virus component.
The free version of MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware is an on-demand scanner, while the paid version has a real-time protection, but it's not an antivirus application.

I hope that explains it.